Freedom FastTrack Podcast

Chris: Hey, Total Freedom Podcasters! Chris Duncan here, and today I’m with a new friend and I feel like we’ve connected already. It’s taken 20 minutes for us to get started because we’ve just been sitting and talking like old friends. Nancy Klensch is the founder—I guess the creator and innovator of Summit Kids, which is an amazing company out in Canada. Nancy, I just want to welcome you from my heart to being on the show. So welcome.

Nancy: Thank you, Chris. It’s great to be here.

[00:00:51]

Chris: It is, and we were talking off recording so much we had to say pause, let’s get started, because we were talking about one thing that I think is so important, and it’s possibly going to end up being name of this episode, which is; “Don’t complain about the world; create the world you want.” I want to start off right there, right where we were, and say; why is that so important to you?

[00:01:13]

Nancy: It’s so important. I mean, that’s the ultimate definition of freedom, isn’t it? It’s creating the world that we want to live in, and that’s just a great place to be, and it’s a great compass to use. I never intended to be an entrepreneur. I didn’t even know I was an entrepreneur. What I did know is what I wanted my life to feel like. I didn’t have these goals that were monetary or anything like that, and people would say to me, “What do you want?” and I’d say, “I don’t know, but I just I know what I want my life to feel like”, and so if I use that as my compass, I’m always going to be heading in the right direction for me, and by default I end up creating a world that I want to live in, so that just becomes the path and whatever that looks like.

Chris: There’s so much in what you’ve just said, and I don’t think that you quite understand how much there is in that, because it’s phenomenal. I say that by what I want it to feel like. And I’m going to circle back around to that statement, because I want to give us a nice introduction of who you are, but that is such an important thing. It’s so critical, and so I’m falling in love with this conversation so much already.

[00:02:40]

Chris: Let’s hone in on that you didn’t intend to be an entrepreneur and talk about your story, because you now run a successful, multiple seven figure business, and it’s doing great things, and changing the world. You’re kind of living the dream of what a lot of people listening to this show see for themselves. So would you do us the pleasure of hearing your journey from being in the corporate world to creating what you have now?

Nancy: Yeah, for sure. It actually even started further back than that. At the age of 30, I essentially started over again. I went through a crazy divorce and I was alone with my son, so I was now a single parent and he was just a baby at the time, and he was really the vehicle that created this momentum for me. So of course I need to go to work. I’m a single parent. I don’t have the luxury of staying home.

Nancy: I started searching for childcare, and I kept running into these awful environments, and these environments that were just quote unquote good enough, and it just really didn’t sit well with me. I found a great day home for a while, and then as he gets older, the childcare environments change as your kids get older, which I didn’t realize either, and I really got pissed off. I’m the pissed off entrepreneur, and I really said, “You know what? This is not okay.” These environments that have no consideration for the child, which sounds like a contradiction because you’d think by the name on the sign on the outside would indicate that there was some level of compassion, and I didn’t find that, and I didn’t find any respect for the family as a whole, and as a parent, what you wanted for your child.

Nancy: There was not one person that, when I went in there, said, “What do you want for him? What do you want this environment to be like?” It was, “This is what we have. Take it or leave it.”

[00:04:59]

Nancy: So that’s where the change came in, and I thought I don’t like this. I don’t like this world. This doesn’t feel good to me, and I thought, what would it take for me to do this? Seems kind of easy, and I think that’s probably where a lot of entrepreneurs start, where they say, “Wow! That seems easy,” and it’s not, and then I think that’s also where a lot of entrepreneurs decide not to follow through with this dream of theirs, because it’s never as easy as the Entrepreneur for Dummies book makes of it to be.

Nancy: But I went back to how I wanted my life to feel like, and how I wanted my parenting to feel like. I wasn’t a victim. I wasn’t a product of my place in life. Being a single mom was not a bad thing, and having to go to work and put my child in childcare wasn’t a bad thing, or it shouldn’t have been a bad thing. I just did it, one day I just did it. I said, “Okay, this is it”, and I quit my job, and actually quit my job about four months before I actually even opened our doors or saw any revenues. So failure was not an option. I was blissfully ignorant. If I even had any notion of how awful it could’ve gone for me, I probably wouldn’t have done it.

Nancy: So there’s something to be said about just having blind faith and just having that compass of wanting your life to feel a certain way, and wanting that world that you live in to look a certain way, and then all of the obstacles decrease. They become these bumps in the road, but they’re nothing that [can] stop you.

[00:07:06]

Chris: I love it, and you’ve said it so many times, being guided by feeling. It’s an incredible, incredible story. The odds against any business working and getting to where you are are against it, but then having the child as a single mom without business experience, this is fantastic.

Chris: I want to just hone in on one thing, which is so many people say start something about what you’re passionate about where we want to go. But here, we’re talking about something that just pissed you off. It was something you were passionate about what you didn’t want, right? And then fell into what you want. Do you think that that was a massive part of your success, that there was so much emotion around, “I just don’t want this”?

[00:07:48]

Nancy Yeah, I think so, and it’s funny, I didn’t even have a business plan. Now, actually, seven years later, I’m going back and I’m putting all those proper business elements back in, because I was just able to barrel ahead absolutely based on I know what I don’t want. And by default it opened what happened wide open. Because I think what happens is when we zero in on exactly what we want, sure we can get it, but we don’t also get any extras either, right? Because we’re just focused on that one thing.

Nancy: When you focus on what you don’t want, the floodgate opens for all of these good things to happen. And then you think, “Wow! That was even more than I expected it to be,” and actually it becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy where it’s, “Wow! Life could be even better than I thought it was.” I just wanted my life to feel good, but now it feels great. Who knew that could happen? Or that’s a great byproduct of just not wanting this situation that sucks. So it’s a great place.

[00:09:06]

Chris:   That’s huge! That’s huge.

Chris: There are so many people talking about go and find your passion. We could nearly do a course right now; “don’t find your passion, find out what you’re pissed off about!”

Nancy: Yeah, and it’s funny because it actually hits you on a different level, and I hear it all the time, “Well, I don’t really know what I want to do,” and it’s this, and everybody’s searching, right? Searching for that big ticket item.

Nancy: When you’re pissed off, it hits you in a different place, and it really hits you in a place of action, because you don’t like it, right? You want to change that. We can float around in this sea of maybe this, maybe that, and kind of this and kind of that. Be influenced by what other people feel is important, but nobody else can tell you what’s going to piss you off. When you reach into that deep feeling of, “Damn, I don’t like that,” there’s nobody that can tell you that. They can say, “Chris, you know what? You’re crazy. How did you think this was going to work?” And you’re going to say, “I knew it was going to work, because I needed it to change.”

Nancy: When we start having these ideas of just maybe, kind of, sort of, then that’s actually the businesses that we build, right? Maybe, kind of, sort of.

[00:10:37]

Chris: Here’s what’s beautiful, and I love you for this, is you didn’t just get pissed off and go and moan and complain about it, and this is what we were talking about before, and I think now’s the right time to bring it out. You did something about it. I’m sitting in January 2017 as we record this, and I’m in the United States, and there’s some interesting stuff happening in politics that are there, and I just see this wave of complaint, and then there’s people that are out there actually acting and doing things, and so…

Chris: How come you had so much courage, to be able to go out there and actually do something? Because it is interesting, most people don’t. What was different?

Nancy: I don’t know! Failure—it just was not an option. I think by default when we take away our safety nets, and maybe that’s where we are a bit—as a world, you know, we like all of these safety nets, and when we don’t have that safety net, then we feel it’s not safe to move forward. For me, it meant there was no going back. I come from very humble beginnings, so there’s no money in my family. There was no; gee if this doesn’t work, I’m just going to call my dad and he’ll just write a check and bail me out. This was it. So you make yourself be the real deal. So, yeah, I don’t know.

[00:12:16]

Nancy: So I’m all about living out on the edge, right? We’ve got the most to risk, but the most to gain as well. And then that’s where change happens, right? I mean we don’t change anything sitting in the middle. That’s where mediocrity lives. If you want to be pissed off, piss off! I’ve never seen anyone get pissed off at so-so. Anybody who made a difference in the world has never said, “Well, I kind of had to make a difference,” right? Kind of wanted to make change. It just doesn’t happen there. It happens at the edge, where there is no safety net.

Chris: The comfort zone is one of the worst things we can get into, even though we do want to feel good, but feeling complaisant and comfortable can really-

[break]

[00:14:07]

Chris: Gosh, this is deep, but I want to ask it to you anyway. You said that you were being guided by feeling, and one thing that I find after interviewing so many people is, people who have actually been able to achieve what they set out to, is this one thing that you just said. So often, the people that are struggling, they feel less than, and they don’t get guided by their feelings, they just get guided by, you get to kind of have to …

Chris: What did you mean when you said guided by your feeling or you were guided by what feels good in your life? Could you elaborate on that? I know it’s tough.

Nancy: That’s a tough one. I think I’ve been blessed by bad circumstance. Can we say that? Where you walk out of a situation and you think, damn, that is not happening again, and I don’t want to feel like that again, so those start to blueprint in you to say … Maybe there’s probably some science around that that probably says that we veer away from that in the future, when it starts to feel like that, that we go, “Whoa, we’ve been here before”, right? It’s touching that hot element, you only do it once before you … You check it out before you put your hand back on it.

Nancy: I think for me a lot of it was my son. I’ll give him a lot of the credit. I think a lot of times when we think of ourselves, that’s where we can get caught in that victim mode. Or even in putting up with too much. I probably should’ve walked away on a lot of bad circumstances in my life long before I did. I’m a slow learner there, I think. I didn’t want that for my son.

[00:16:14]

Chris: Right: Tell us about your son, and tell us about the business that you started, because I think that that’s important right now.

Nancy: Yeah. I started Summit Kids, and Summit Kids is a before-and-after school program. My son was in a program like this, and this was the year that it all happened for me. I went in and there’s broken toys and he’s playing in the corner. Nobody’s paying attention. There’s some 19-year-old kid quote unquote watching the kids, and she’s on her cell phone, and I thought, wow, environment is so important, and when we talk about environment, it’s where people thrive, and this was not an environment where these children were thriving. This was just running the clock out until the parents show up, and I thought; my son is worth more than that.

Nancy: I needed him to be around great people doing great things, and this just wasn’t it, and this was actually standard operating for childcare environments, and the kids are older, they’re school age, so there tends to be a less nurturing environment. There are no kids crying and no needing to rock them to sleep and things like that. These are older kids, and so they’re pretty self-sufficient.

[00:17:54]

Nancy: It just didn’t sit right with me. Really I’ve been trying to build great environments for him ever since. By default, we have 800 kids that benefit from my need to have my child in a great environment. So now, I’m an advocate for these children and for these parents that just didn’t know they could ask for better, and I created this environment and my whole criteria was, what do I want that environment to look like? What do I want that environment to feel like? What type of people do I want him to be around? What type of experiences do I want him to have?

Nancy: When I started writing it out, it was all doable. He’s 14 now, he’s in junior high, but still every day at Summit Kids, I use that as my decision making process; would I want this environment for my son? These kids are so willing and capable, and they’re wanting to learn. They actually, if you leave them to their own devices, there’s more than you think that they would do. We actually had our kindergarten class a couple of years ago working on grade three science, and somebody said, “Well, that’s wrong!” And I said, “They actually, the kids drove the program. They came in every day and said, ‘We want to do more.” And so we just let them run with it, and by the end of the year, these five-year-olds were doing grade three science.

[00:19:46]

Nancy: I think we’re really not giving kids the credit that they need. So I facilitate that. I’m that vehicle. I’m that intersection between home and school. There’s a lot of things now that they don’t get from school environments, and that could be another topic, that’s another topic I could go on about, and there’s a lot of things that they can’t get from their parents, and parents are, their resources are tight, whether it’s time or money or whatever it is. So if we can be that third place for the kids, then we can provide something really great, and there are no limitations.

Chris: Your viewpoint is funny. You say the third place, because I was going to bring up Starbucks. You say the third place, which was obviously their intention.

[00:20:40]

Chris: Here’s what I see, entrepreneurs who are listening—is Nancy was pissed off, saw a problem, saw a place that could create immense value, but this is what I love is you literally just created something for you, and there’s this unconscious thing that happened which was like, “Well if I want it, other people must want it.” And this is one of the easiest places to build businesses, is build the thing that you wish was there, or create the thing that you would like to use, because it sounds to me, and tell me if I’m wrong, that you would be or are, if it was somebody else creating it, the number one advocate of this thing. You kind of built it for yourself.

Nancy: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that’s it. That’s that piece of that world that I want to live in. We know that we spend more time at work than we do at any other aspect of our lives, so why wouldn’t I want that piece of my life to be one of the most rewarding things that I do?

[00:21:37]

Nancy: It’s really an extension of me. There’s lots of people that have come into our environment that then they say, “Oh, yeah, I clearly Nancy designed this space or Nancy’s designed the programming,” because it really is an extension of me. I don’t even need to be there and you can feel that my presence is there. I’m not sure how my staff feel about that.

Chris: [laughs]

Nancy: I might be an ominous presence. No, I’m just kidding. I have a great team.

Chris: I bet you do! Just, scaled to the size that you have, team and systems and technologies—so I bet you do.

[00:22:17]

Chris: I’ve got two questions I ask everybody that comes on this show, and I think its such important questions to understand, after all the experience, where you are now, what you would do. Very easy. Here’s the first one.

Chris: If right now you lost it all, and you lost your business, you lost all the connections you’ve made, it’s just you and your family, and you’re tasked with the question of building a business or starting again. How would you do it?

Nancy: How would I do it? I’d probably do it in a very similar way. The beauty is you can’t unknow something. There is no actually starting back at square one again, because by default I know what I know. I’ve made a number of mistakes. I’ve had a number of opportunities. So right off the bat, I’m starting halfway through.

Nancy: I think that i would use the same guiding principles. I would say, “Okay. Here. Maybe I’m in a different phase in my life and, you know, and the situation looks different, but what do I want it to feel like? What do I want that next, that next piece of my evolution to look like?” And just start designing that. I don’t know maybe it will be another thing that would piss me off. There’s a lot of things, and you’re right, there’s a lot of things right now going on in the world that we could say, “Damn, if I could just change that.” Well, I don’t know, then go and change that. And that’s a great place to start.

[00:24:06]

Chris: It’s an amazing place to start, and I wish that everyone listening hears that, because I see a lot of people that are annoyed and pissed off at things, and then I see this amazing person I’m talking to today, who wasn’t just annoyed, that actually started it.

Chris: So here’s the second part to the question. If today you got to fly back in time to when you first started, so back to 2008 or 2009, and you have a minute or two minutes to give yourself advice, what advice would you give yourself right back at the beginning?

Nancy: Two pieces of advice. One, run your own race. I’ve never been caught in what anybody else is doing, and every once in a while, I have some of my teammates that are going, “What about this and what about that and what’s going on out there?” Like I say, I was so blissfully ignorant when I started … And keep running your own race. People will say it’s not going to work. People will say you are crazy. I think we have a small dose of crazy in us just wanting to get out into the world and change stuff that pisses us off, and that’s fine.

[00:25:20]

Nancy: And probably the big thing is also, success and accomplishments are different. And I don’t really think I need the difference between them. Even in conversation, we use the terms interchangeably all the time. You can have all sorts of accomplishments. You can win awards, and you can get all sorts of accolades, and you can still wake up in the morning and not feel like you’re being successful. So those are two different things, and really not to be confused by them. I don’t think there’s a wrong answer. You want to chase accomplishments, great. If you want to chase success, great. Just understand that they will feel different, because they’re not the same thing.

Chris: I love how guided you are by what feels right. That’s really important to me and I really appreciate that, because having that guiding internal force, I don’t think you can ever go wrong, and even sometimes when you’re going into things that are tough, if it felt right to go into it, you kind of needed to do it. Like I said, it’s cool.

[00:26:32]

Chris: So what’s next for you? What’s the vision for the future for you and your business?

Nancy: Oh, the future for us. We’re really excited. We’re launching a series of daycares, which is something I said I’d never do. I said, “No. That’s okay. I don’t need to do that.” But the more that I’m involved in this industry, the more I’ve become an advocate for children that we serve, and the more that I work with different schools and see how the school systems work. I just, by default, take on another chunk of it because, again, it’s that piece where I go that just doesn’t sit right.

Nancy: One of the big things for us is we are partnering with an extended care facility, which is a seniors home. I don’t know if we say seniors anymore, because sometimes that extended care facility could be 55 and up, so by no means what we would consider a senior citizen. What we will be doing is we will be launching our daycares within those environments, and so what that is going to create is this whole multi-generational community where our little guys get to interact with the extended care residents.

Nancy: It fits on so many different levels. We’ve got little guys who their grandparents are halfway around the world, and so they don’t have that figure in their lives. We also have these residents in these facilities that don’t really have access to children anymore. The one facility that we’re going into has a dementia unit, so by default these people don’t get out, they don’t get out, they don’t get to experience other people, and so we are building this really great program to connect these groups together.

[00:28:47]

Nancy: Because at the end of the day, humans need humans. We know that. We know that we die without human contact. If we’re building environments for both children and people at the other end of their lives, we still need to make that human piece such an important part. And there’s just a million things that we’re going to do with that. We’ve just been hammering out the initial agreement and partnership, but this for us it really does create a whole new world literally.

Chris: It’s amazing. I feel so moved that you’re doing that. I think that one of my biggest blessings in my life is I did get to hang out with my grandparents. I believe that in most of the Asian world, that the parents are out working and the grandparents are actually the ones to raise the children, because they have the time, and the parents can then get out and work, and it’s like we’ve missed that a little bit in the Western world. So I love that.

Chris: We’ll talk off air a little bit more about that, but thank you so much for being on here today!

Nancy: Thank you so much. This has been exciting.

[00:30:06]

Chris: I’m just looking at my page here and out of everything you gave everyone permission. That’s how I feel today is that today you got permission to be guided by your feelings. If you’re pissed off by something, then make something better. Be guided by that and don’t be a victim. Go out. Failure is not an option. Run your own race. Focus on success.

Chris: And something that was unsaid but was there, was a complete focus on service. You are a servant entrepreneur to the highest degree, and that’s exciting, and so I am inspired just being here listening to you. You’re amazing. Thank you for being here.

Nancy: Thank you. Thank you so much.

Chris: And I guess there’s only one other real question is people that want to reach out and connect, maybe they like what you’re doing, they’re in a different part of the world, they think they could—is there an email or is there a place they can go to if they want to reach out and touch base with you? Or visit Facebook? What’s—

Nancy: Yeah. Our website is summitkids.ca, not .com, .ca. We’re in Canada. My email is [email protected]. Yeah, would love to hear from any of the listeners and let people know what we’re doing, and there’s so much more change to happen out there, and yeah, everyone officially has permission to be pissed off.

Chris: [laughs]

Chris: This is the Total Freedom Podcast. My name is Christopher Duncan, and this is Nancy Klensch, and it was so good to have you here. You have permission to be pissed off today. Live with total freedom. Free your mind. Free your time. Free your life. And do what matters most. And don’t let that pissed off thing stay in your reality. Have a great day.

Chris: It’s so funny. Let me just turn off the recording.

Chris: Hey, Freedom Fast Trackers. It’s Chris Duncan here and today, I’m so excited. I’m with Dr. Greg Wells. He’s the author of “Super Bodies: Peak Performance Secrets From The World’s Best Athletes,” which explores the brain, muscles, lungs, heart and blood and how they work together in extreme conditions. Today, we’re going to talk about productivity. Greg, I’m so excited to have you on the show, man. Welcome.

Dr. Greg Wells: Thank you so much. I’m super psyched to be here and to meet everybody.

[00:00:52]

Chris: We’ve been talking about this a lot actually, Greg. We’ve had a brief introduction just recently—well just today—to this, to each other and here’s what I really want to explore: athletes. I think that athletes and entrepreneurs are similar in so many ways, in one way, and that’s that we want to get the most out of our bodies and to perform at our highest peak. We were talking about that off the air. What are your thoughts on that?

Dr. Greg Wells: Yeah, well—so many people are trying to do that these days. It’s particularly relevant for entrepreneurs and one of the main reasons that I think it’s important that we have this conversation is that one of the things that’s not being spoken about is the fact that in Silicon Valley, in tons of startups, it’s sort of the hotbed of innovation and with all that happening it’s also, sadly, one of the locations in the US that has the highest suicide rates. Entrepreneurs are out there and, unfortunately, especially when you’re getting started, you have to do everything. You’re the CEO, CTO, CFO, CIO. Everything.

Chris: E-I-E-I-O? [laughs]

Dr. Greg Wells: You’re under so much pressure, and we put pressure on ourselves for going down this road. Your family eating might depend upon it. We put the business ahead of ourselves and I strongly believe in working on this myself as an entrepreneur in addition to being faculty at a university, is trying to live a healthy life because it’s the only way that I can perform at my best. I think people quite often don’t keep that in mind or aren’t able to do the health and performance thing at the same time.

[00:02:28]

Chris:   It is tough. It is tough and I can’t wait to dive deep, but let’s start with you and your entrepreneur story, Greg, because I heard that you’ve got something going on that’s pretty good and I would love to know a lot more about your story, where you are now, and kind of the road to get you there.

Dr. Greg Wells: It’s been, like every entrepreneur, probably a million different directions and finally now going in the right one. Up, down, sideways, backwards. I was an athlete growing up. I was a competitive swimmer and that sort of formed what I did. I went to university and took a chemistry degree, which was great. As soon as I graduated from my chemistry degree, I started a company straight out of university and it did really well. I kind of maximized that out until I was sort of punching way above my weight. Someone challenged me on my qualifications one day and legitimately so.

Dr. Greg Wells: I went back and ended up doing a Master’s PhD at the University of Toronto in physiology and studied lead athletes, high-performance athletes, Olympic athletes and ended up also doing exercise medicine to figure out how we can use, exercise to help people with chronic diseases like Cancer. So I kind of work at the extremes now. I’m a Physiologist and I study elite athletes, but I also study people with chronic illnesses. I ended up commentating the Olympics here in Canada. Out of television, came speaking engagements and that book that you mentioned, Super bodies and then now a whole bunch of requests from companies to help them implement performance and health from elite sports from extreme physiology to help them perform better in business. So that’s sort of like 20 years summarized in 30 seconds.

Dr. Greg Wells: But it’s pretty amazing now that learning from the extremes is having so much of an impact to help people perform better in business and to be healthier. Imagine if we could work really, really well and at the end of the day, go home with energy to play with your kids, or crush it for an entire week and then have the ability to go home on the weekends and have energy to go take your family to go do something epic because we know that experiences determine happiness. That’s what I’m trying to figure out is how we help people to really reach their potential as human beings in every aspect of their lives.

[00:04:48]

Chris: Wow. I think that it’s such an underutilized and under emphasized but so important part of being an entrepreneur. I mean, we see so many people talk about the next marketing tactic or next tactic of this or that but the truth is that I see so many people hustling for 18 hours a day but for 13 or 14 of those hours, they’re burnt out, they’re stressed, they’re not doing anything. I see them ruining other parts of their life. It’s turning into a little bit of an epidemic where it’s nearly so cool to be that. What does Gary Vaynerchuk say? “The 6 am to 2 am hustle.”

Dr. Greg Wells: Right, and you can play that game for a short period of time but the reality is that physiologically, it’s almost impossible to pull off and you try to be the 1 in a million person that can do it but the reality is that you’re probably going to get sick. If you are an entrepreneur, you want to be able to do this for a long time. You know if you’re in and out and you manage to sell your company, great. If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re probably going to start another one. So this is a 20-30 year journey we are all on. The idea, I think that I would love to share with people is—it’s sort of a sports analogy:

Dr. Greg Wells: Back in the 80’s and even in the 90’s, the way that athletes were trained was simply to put athletes through as hard of a training program as you could for as long as you could. It was high volumes, as many meters as you can put in, as many reps as you can put in. The people who made the Olympics and those who were successful in the Olympics were simply those who didn’t get sick, didn’t get broken down, and didn’t get injured. As a result, careers were very short. You looked at the average age of an Olympian in the 1980’s, it was very young, it was early 20’s.

[00:06:34]

Dr. Greg Wells: Now we’re seeing people winning medals at the Olympics and we saw Phelps in 2004 was his first one, so it was his fourth Olympics. People winning medals repeatedly winning medals in their 30’s, 40’s—and in some cases, even in their 50’s in Equestrian. So, it’s been a total shift now to where athletes are focusing more on recovery and regeneration than they are on the training itself. You can do an amazing workout but after that you’re doing perfect nutrition. You’re sleeping, you’re doing massage therapy. That’s exactly the same approach that I think we need to take in business. You can travel, do an amazing presentation, fly home but unless you’re paying attention to your nutrition when you’re on the road, you’re not going to perform your best. Unless you’re paying attention to your sleep, you’re not going to be able to function the next day. Unless you’re working out, your brain will not be able to do what it’s actually capable of.

Dr. Greg Wells: You mentioned Gary Vaynerchuk. The transformation in him over the last couple of years, since he’s prioritized his training in the morning, is pronounced. It’s the reason why he can travel and is one of the main reasons he is hustling so much.  It’s because he’s prioritizing to do it and exercise. If you listen to him carefully, he’s taking regular vacations. He’s taking weekends off with his family. So although he’s talking hustle, hustle, hustle, if you actually breakdown his life and his real life, he’s putting these principles into practice as well. I think that if all of us learn how to do it, then it turns into a series of repeated sprints and high performance rather than just struggling through a long, long, long marathon.

[00:08:11]

Chris: Wow, I like that metaphor. Series of repeated sprints. That’s actually really, really good. That’s how we can look at our business as well.  I think what I’m really hearing is such a bigger focus on the long game because you know you cannot sprint a term, it’s really a long game.

Chris: I just came back from this really intense tour of Asia, speaking over there. Making the shift there, the time zone shift first and then being in the airport, the food is no good. Then the plane food and the hotel and health is one of my highest priority. Sometimes it’s extremely difficult to make.

Dr. Greg Wells: I know, I just got off the plane, I flew home from Sydney, Australia last night to Toronto and it was a six day turnaround. I left on Monday and I was back on Sunday. I went down there for a speaking engagement. The first three days that I was there, I was actually in a hotel.

[00:09:06]

Dr. Greg Wells: The hotel, it was fine but it was a hotel where I noticed there was a lot of older people on tours that were staying there and the food was atrocious. I actually moved. I was like, I’m out of here. I left. I moved to a hotel that was right on Bondi Beach. In the bottom of the beach, where the hotel that I was staying were 4-5 incredible health food.

Chris: It’s great there.

Dr. Greg Wells: Yeah, it’s amazing there. So I went from really struggling to feeling awesome because I could get up in the morning, I can go for a run on the beach and come back and have an ultra-super healthy breakfast. Go crush it all day long, come back at night. Go meditate on the beach, go for a swim, it an amazing super healthy dinner and it like revolutionized my trip. I think that so often we consider the external environment to dictate the terms of how we operate on a day to day basis, especially in business. Well we cannot do that. We have to plan ahead, if you have an EA, get them to organize your hotel, have them book you a trainer. In the new location, have them book you a massage on arrival. Call ahead, and order ahead the foods that you want to eat. A lot of hotels will do that now.

Dr. Greg Wells: So you can actually construct your external life. To me it’s even better at home. It’s called Forced Optimization. You basically create an environment where it is inevitable that you do the healthy thing. It does take a long time to setup. I’m now—what is it, January 31st?—and I’ve been working on this more or less for the last three weeks nonstop. Because that is the number one priority in my life this year is health set and forced optimization. Getting my workout scheduled and in the calendar. Pre-paying for 20 yoga classes so I have no choice not to go. Weekly massage on Friday afternoons so I make sure I decompress from the week before I go home for the weekend. All of these little things add up to enable you to sustain world class performance over an extended period of time.

[00:10:58]

Chris: I love it. I love Forced Optimization. I want to know about this because I’m going to implement the heck out of this Greg. This is so badass.

Chris: So run us through Forced Optimization. How you’re doing it for no other reason other than—so, listeners I’m sorry. I’m having a selfish moment, but I really want to know what it is you’re doing, because I’m going to do this.

Dr. Greg Wells: All right, cool.

Dr. Greg Wells: The first thing is. Part I: One vacation every quarter. So at the end of every quarter for the entire year, I book two weeks to take a vacation and that amounts to 8 weeks a year which I realize that’s a lot. Unless I noticed I didn’t do it last year. I did March but I missed the one in June. As a result, I struggled for the summer. It’s really crucial. You can work while you’re away but you need to get away and you need to remove yourself. If anything to force you to construct a business that can operate on its own. I mean that’s part I.

Dr. Greg Wells: Part II. Is that you can recover, regenerate, and get creative again. So that’s the first thing that I put into practice. I’ve already got those scheduled for the entire year and it’s wicked. I’m doing Nicaragua, India for a meditation retreat. I’m doing Utah for mountain biking. Really cool stuff but that’s already pre-programmed and it’s also a way to connect with my family. On a weekly basis, I prioritized a couple of things when it comes to my health.

[00:12:20]

Dr. Greg Wells: First one is flexibility, and the second one is strength.

Dr. Greg Wells: I found a yoga studio in my area and booked three times a week when I go to yoga every second day. I know it’s a lot of time but I’m really interested. I particularly chose hot yoga. It’s Moksha Yoga, or you can find Bikram whatever, and I’m doing that because research has shown that three times a week in a sauna increases your blood volume and increases your endurance without doing any endurance training. That’s sort of a biohack that I’m putting into practice.

Dr. Greg Wells: Then I hired a personal trainer.  Actually a local cross-fit gym. You could like or dislike cross-fit. I just wanted one person to work with in a gym with lots of equipment. He and I see each other three times a week on Tuesday morning, Thursday morning and Saturday mornings. I am prioritizing that and I’ve sort of blocked off some time in the afternoons each day to do something fun. Be that a swim, a social squash game, a social mountain bike ride. Like something where I am connecting with someone that I want to connect with but doing so on a physical activity.

Dr. Greg Wells: So between all of that I programmed in believe it or not, I know it’s a ton but I programmed in about 12 hours a week of physical activity and I think that’s sort of a minimum that humans requires about six so I’m trying to double that. I know it’s a lot.  It’s time away from the business but I find that if I do it, my days are world-class. My thinking is exceptional, my stress levels drop, my creativity goes through the roof, my ability to handle stress is completely different. It’s weird taking one step back in order to take two steps forward every single week.

[00:13:55]

Chris: Right! It’s almost like you’re stretching the elastic band but you’re giving yourself that tension release structure. We actually go and have that break and stay put and not move forward in your business but move forward in so many other areas which that makes you kind of explode and come back. I really like it. It’s an awesome concept.

Dr. Greg Wells: Yeah. It’s really working out really well. One other little idea for people is that every single morning … I know that I work best from 7 to 10 am is when I’m at my absolute best so I’m trying really hard to protect that time of the day for creativity, for writing, for energizing, and for developing. The rest of the day is open for meeting and the rest of the stuff that doesn’t demand quite the same amount. So really protecting that time during the day when you…

Chris: Yeah. I love it. I think everyone has…

Dr. Greg Wells: Go ahead Chris, sorry.

Chris: Yeah, I think we just had a little bit of break up but I’m sure the listeners are loving this anyway. I think that everyone has their optimal peak time of the day. And finding that is critical. So, do you really protect that 7 to 10 am? Do you put outside of that meetings or when do you put your exercise during the day?

[00:15:15]

Dr. Greg Wells: Exercise goes first thing in the morning. I’ve got two little kids and so unless I finish working out by 7 it’s just not going to happen. Both my wife and I wake up around 5. We’ve got a gym in the house and I also live very close to a gym. We deliberately chose to live close to an area where there’s parks and everything else so we can workout outside. So both of us train in the morning and then the kids get up around 6:45, 7:00. We get them out the door. We dive into our own major projects, whatever that happens to be. My wife is starting up a Chiropractic practice and I dive into whatever I’m trying to do. So early, early, early in the morning and trying to leave the afternoons for some fun stuff just to decompress at the end of the day.

Chris: I love that brother, I love it. So you got the vacation, and you got the flexibility and the strength happening six times a week basically as well as fun everyday. And this is epic. Is there anything else you use to really create force of optimization?

Dr. Greg Wells: Yeah. There’s sort of two other pieces, I know people are going to think I’m nuts, but absolute …

Chris: In a good way.

Dr. Greg Wells: Hopefully in a good way. Number one priority is sleeping. And 7 1/2 hours. Because there is a small subset of the population that has a genetic code that allows them to sleep for about 3 hours and be completely recovered but the research is absolutely clear that any less than 6 hours a night and you have an increased risk all-cause mortality and illness. So for me it’s getting those five complete 90 minute sleep cycle 7 1/2 hours. That is an absolute priority for me. We know that we learn in the first 3-4 hours of sleep and we know that we are creative and problem-solve in the second 3 1/2 to 4 hours of sleep. I need it mentally. We release growth hormone when we sleep so it helps me to recover from workouts so that sleep is another thing that my wife and I super prioritized. Even when I travel, you know I crushed it on the way to and from Australia. I managed to get 7 1/2 hours on the plane in both directions. You know I really don’t feel that jet-lagged today to be completely honest. I feel pretty good, so.

Chris: Wow.

[00:17:20]

Dr. Greg Wells: And then food—obviously, you need to protect your food. You cannot just be randomly eating the garbage that’s available to us in North America. We have to be doing super high nutrient foods. Minimizing our calories, maximizing our nutrients and so the days that I organize and take my own food with me from home, are the days when I’m absolutely world class. If I neglect to do that, then I really struggle and if I eat on the road, I’m opening myself up to allowing the environment to determine my success which according to forced optimization is not the way forward.

Dr. Greg Wells: Judith and I, my wife, are trying to be super disciplined. With just being organized in the morning and make sure we are leaving with great food. If you do that, sleep, eat and move. You take care of those three components and you’re 90% of the way there.

Chris: I mean, it’s awesome. I love that you got that sleep, eat and move. Just those three reminders because sometimes we can get ourselves so caught in biohacking that we forget the basics.

Dr. Greg Wells: The ultimate biohack, you know, physiologically. I don’t love the term biohacking although I use it a lot because it’s all about short cuts. Unfortunately, the way that the human body works is it works really well when things are done consistently over an extended period of time. It’s the aggregate of 1% gains. If you do things consistently, your body adapts. Your hormone levels change. You get stronger, you get thinner, you’re able to concentrate better.

[00:18:51]

Dr. Greg Wells: Diving into shortcuts means you can perform well for a day or two but you don’t end up being truly world class. So there’s no biohack to an Olympic gold medal. There’s just many, many thousands of hours of suffering. Yeah, so it’s the foundation upon which you can build everything else if your nutrition is world class then you can supplement. If your sleep is amazing, then you can do a biohack to improve your concentration during the day. Biohacking a bad diet, isn’t going to work.  Biohacking a bad nights sleep isn’t going to work. Biohacking fitness without going to the gym, isn’t going to happen. Just build that foundation. Take some time and you will completely totally and utterly revolutionize your life in the long term.

Chris: I love it man. I love it so much.

[break]

[00:20:45]

Chris: There are a few things here that I want to dive deeper into, but nothing more than sleep. Because I think sleep for a lot of us is one of the hardest things. You talked about 7 1/2 hours of sleep and the five 90 minute sleep cycles which I understand. That means that you’re going to bed about 10 pm. I would love to hear your thoughts on sleep, having a good sleep, and some of the things that you do because for me and I’m sure a lot of our listeners, like my brain is hyperactive, I’m still thinking and getting to sleep and going deep is sometimes super difficult.

Dr. Greg Wells: It is. I was sort of forced into this a while ago because I had 4 years ago I launched my first book and I was getting ready to commentate the Olympics. I was starting up a new lab at the university where I was at. We were moving, my wife was just finishing grad school, I was just a train wreck with everything in life. My daughter went to Daycare and she got a cold, she came home, I got the virus. It went into my heart and gave me viral myocarditis and I was repeatedly in the hospital. I was studying, studying, studying how to get out of this situation because I was allergic to all the medications. Repeatedly over and over and over again in the research avoiding cancer, fixing heart disease, getting rid of depression, over every single disease, sleep component that was related to it and so we started with that as our foundation for rebuilding our lives and rebuilding my health.

Dr. Greg Wells: I’m the same as you, my mind is going 8 thousand miles an hour. I’m hyper, I’m crazy, I love work. I’m starting labs, I’m creating books, I doing speaking engagements, like it’s nuts. As a result, I found it incredibly difficult to sleep. So I constructed and have lately refining it and continue to work on this, ruthlessly protecting the hour before you go to sleep. I don’t know about you but I’ve not really written a world class email late at night. If it’s 9:45 and I’m writing emails, it’s a problem. And not only that, the people that are receiving my emails, I’m disrupting their evenings as well because if it’s from me, they’re probably going to read it. I know that’s an ego thing to say but if you’re in my organization you’re probably going to read my email if I send it to you.

[00:22:55]

Dr. Greg Wells: What I do is an hour before sleep, I try to ruthlessly protect that time. The devices go off. Absolutely no screens. We got rid of cable. We don’t watch television. I have no time to watch television—there is not much good on anyway—so we get rid of all of that.

Dr. Greg Wells: We do a series of things. Hot bath, cold shower is amazing for triggering Melatonin release.  So 10 minutes in a steaming hot bath, Epsom salt for sure just to help you to recover from the day. Stand up out of that, cold shower to cool the body and the change in body temperature triggers Melatonin release. Then into some very, very light yoga poses or 20 minutes of meditation? Awesome, fantastic—I’m huge into meditation these days. Followed by 10 to 15 minutes of reading fiction because fiction activates the same parts of your brain that are activated during dreaming. If I followed that sequence of events, then I’m relaxed, my mind is not racing, I’ve calmed myself down. I’ve connected with my spouse. My body has been dealt with, my mind has been dealt with. I have eliminated the racing thoughts that occur with work and I fall asleep quickly, I fall asleep deeply, and I wake up the next morning and I feel like a million bucks.

Dr. Greg Wells: So what I would encourage everyone to do is to build that sleep routine. The same thing you would do if you’re getting ready for a major presentation. You don’t just suddenly walk in and wing it. You know you prepare, you rehearse, you calm yourself down, you get psyched up right as the presentation is about to start.

[00:24:26]

Dr. Greg Wells: If you look at every single world class performer, they have routines that they follow to guarantee performance. It’s the same thing with sleep, we need to have routines that we do at a specific time of day consistently that allow us to sleep well and signals to your body and mind that this is what’s going to happen next. You can get really good at sleep. Once you’re amazing at it, then maybe you can go from 7 1/2 down to six if you’re really, really busy but protecting that time and trying to make sure that you sleep awesome is huge.

Dr. Greg Wells: I’ve also found if you do that hour routine before you have to fall asleep, that I never wake up in the middle of the night. So if I’m working right up until I go to sleep, I will dream about work, I’ll wake up 2 o’clock in the morning, my mind will be racing and I’ll have a hard time falling back asleep again. But if I follow my routine, I go to sleep quickly, I go to sleep deeply, I do not wake up. I wake up the next day and feel like a million bucks.

Chris: Wow, it seems so simple but there’s some perfection and I love it. I just wish that entrepreneurs would hear this because these sort of things—and listeners these things make the difference as you go through these higher levels. It’s huge.

Dr. Greg Wells: Yeah. If you look at the really to truly world class people that are crushing it in business repeatedly, I would argue that lifestyle determines your long-term success. Success does not determine your lifestyle. So a lot of people are like you know what I’ll take care of myself once I’ve made it and once I’ve sold and once I’ve got a million, a couple of million dollars in the bank. Well the reality is that 99% of the people out there is that you’re not going to end up being successful unless you do that.

[00:26:02]

Dr. Greg Wells: So build the lifestyle that enables you to succeed and succeed long-term. And what is going to enable you to be world-class for 5-10 years. And no one can sustain that. If you think about your competition, if you think about the people that are trying to compete with. You know they’re probably going to adopt the short, fast, success route and you’ll take them out over time. It might take you a year.

Dr. Greg Wells: It might take you 3 years, it might take you 5 years but I guarantee you that in the end, if you do these things right, you’re the one that’s going to be creating multiple world-class, you know either one business that lasts forever or multiple exceptional opportunities. You’ll maximize your potential as a human being. If you don’t do it, you cannot function well when you’re sick, you cannot function when you’re tired, you cannot function when you’re burnt out. You cannot be creative if you’re not fit. You cannot problem-solve if you’re racing around. So it’s just about adopting a completely different strategy.

Chris: Yeah. I’m with you. And you know here’s what I love so much Greg what you’re talking about is that it’s literally their potential and people can have the best mindset, the best ideas, the best creativity, the best team but then they limit their long-term potential by not taking care of this stuff. And it’s that big. You know how many times I have heard you say the word, “world-class?” And I love it every time you say it.

[00:27:28]

Chris: So I’m going to ask the question; what does world-class mean to you? What is a world-class performance? Because it seems to be something that I just want to be.

Dr. Greg Wells: Yeah, so I get challenged on this a lot because I speak in schools and in businesses, and law firms and everywhere else and people are always pressuring me, what is world-class? So when I’m at the hospital for sick children in Toronto where I’m a researcher and I’m very, very fortunate to be able to do some research in the cancer ward. And for some kids, going through chemo and radiation, world-class means going to the bathroom by yourself. World-class is getting up and walking up and down the hallway. That is a world-class performance for that individual that 99.9% of the population would not be able to do and they give up.

Dr. Greg Wells: And so, what I mean by world-class is you reaching your potential, whatever that happens to be. It’s like going for a walk after dinner, it’s that disconnecting from work and actually taking your kids to the park and being with them and not checking your phone with them while you’re at the park. Having dinner with your family and actually having a conversation with your teenager where you really listen. Is that delivering a world-class presentation on strategy to your teens that they’re all with you. It’s literally whatever—it’s you reaching your potential in that particular moment.

[00:29:00]

Dr. Greg Wells: I’m fortunate. I’ve been with Olympic champions. I’ve been with people that have run across the Sahara desert, I’ve been up mountains that have been the closest people in the world to the stars basically at one moment in times. So I’ve been very, very fortunate to be with some unbelievable people. Around the Richard Branson’s and the Steve Wozniak’s. You’re in Alex Charfen’s office, he’s rocking it as well. Amazing people like that and world-class is what you’re capable of today and in this moment. And really trying to optimize that and if you do that consistently over time, no one can keep up. Because the vast majority of the world are not interested in playing that game.

Chris: Brother, I love it. We’re definitely interested in world-class. I’ve got so many things circled on my page here that I would like to keep asking you but I want to talk about one that’s popping out and that’s about meditation. You’ve mentioned it quite a few times and it seems to be a biohack that’s not even really a hack it’s kind of just what’s necessary.

Chris: What’s your meditation routine? Because I think a lot of entrepreneurs want to do it, but like me, struggle with it and want to be able to do more.

Dr. Greg Wells: Yeah that’s my fourth pillar. It’s Eat, Sleep, Move, Think.

Chris: [laughs]

Dr. Greg Wells: Like seriously, we are setting the foundations that we can think because ultimately our businesses come out of our brains and you want people to be able to crush it and if your brain is not functioning well than you cannot do what you’re capable of.

Dr. Greg Wells: So meditation has become a foundational practice for me. It emerged last summer as I was writing my book. So I was writing a new book called The Ripple Effect. It’s coming out in April. It’s built on these four pillars we’ve been talking about. What I did, I would wake up in the morning and I would go for a swim with my buddies. Come back and grab a coffee and meditate for 20 minutes and then I would start writing.

Dr. Greg Wells: The days that I meditated, my writing was off the charts, better than the days that I didn’t. My ability to concentrate was completely different. I felt steady and stable all day long. Clear. Things would arise and I would immediately be able to control my attention, to be able to direct it in the places I wanted to.

[00:31:27]

Dr. Greg Wells: So, meditation has become a core practice for me. I do just very simple, 20 minutes a day. I find a quiet place to sit down. I try to make sure there are no distractions. No potential for interruption. Ideally outdoors but whatever, it doesn’t really matter. Then do a few minutes of just deep breathing just to kind of [inaudible 00:31:50] myself. I would then just express gratitude and sort of be thankful for the opportunity that I have in life and where I am. I’ve been to Africa, I’ve been to India, I’ve seen the most difficult situations in the world and so I try to remind myself of how fortunate I am. And then I think a little bit about why I’m doing it. Why am I doing all of this stuff. It’s for my family, it’s for my kids and for myself to have a different life, a cool, fun life.

Dr. Greg Wells: So, it’s sort of breathing, followed by gratitude, followed by purpose and then I will do about 10 minutes where I just simply count my breaths and try to just focus on my breathing. And that’s it, just really slow breaths and try to count 10 if I get distracted, I start back over to zero. I count to ten repeatedly over and over and over again.

Dr. Greg Wells: Then the final 5-10 minutes, depending on what I’m doing, it’s simply a body scan. I think about my head, my eyebrows, my throat, my chest, my stomach, my hips, my knees, my feet, and then go back up. Travel up and down through my body a bunch of times and try to eliminate tension. Anywhere that I find tension, I just sort of let it go. I try to get into a deep relaxed state as I can. It’s amazing, by the end of it, you cannot even feel your body until you direct your attention on that area. Then after that’s done, I just sort of bring my attention back to the world and take a few deep breaths, open my eyes and take in what’s going on around me and slowly come out of it. And that whole routine takes me about 15-20 minutes.

[00:33:24]

Dr. Greg Wells: I learned it by doing HeadSpace so if anyone wants to get into it, the HeadSpace app is how I learned and I use it quite often. So if anyone is traveling, I do meditation during take-off. It usually takes about 20 minutes. I do my routine now. I sit down in my seat, I close my eyes and I do my 20 minute meditation. By the time I’m done, we’re at cruising altitude and I can open up my computer and get to work. And then doing it first thing in the morning and last thing at night is also just brilliant.

Dr. Greg Wells: If I had a particularly bad day and I’m fortunate enough to work in places where a bad day can be really, really, really bad. And I said it’s an honor to work with people who are battling chronic illnesses and so some days are tough. If I’ve had a rough day, I need to go home and be with my kids or be with my family then meditation enables me to be able to do that. But first thing in the morning is also amazing because it sets you up with just a different experience mentally than if you don’t do it.

Chris: Yeah. I feel that a lot of people try to rush it or think ah, I’m just going to skip it because they don’t have the time or whatever but I’m with you. Everyday that I go deep and I really, really, really feel clear in my meditation and I get that which isn’t everyday Greg. I am still practicing still getting better at it. But the days that I really have been good, oh my god, my days are just on fire. That actually happened today.

Dr. Greg Wells: Oh right on! That’s awesome.

[00:34:52]

Dr. Greg Wells: Yeah, I had a couple of really wild breakthroughs. Like one of the breakthroughs that I had was when I actually was able to count my breaths without getting distracted and did that for about 5 minutes, my brain felt totally different. And then I really noticed that I was able to stop ruminating thoughts. So if you’re thinking and ruminating about something and you’re replaying something that bugs you or something that your spouse said or maybe your parents or anything that’s bugging you. What I’ve noticed is, I just let it go. Like it just disappears. I noticed when I’m ruminating, yeah that’s a waste of time, gone. And my ability to do that has just exploded.

Dr. Greg Wells: Another thing that sort of happened to me this week when I was in Australia and I was meditating down on Bondi in the morning was that just totally stable energy level all day long after the meditation happens. I’m done meditating but all day long, smooth, steady, calm, controlled, like it was just bizarre how it translated to the rest of my life. And I love the quote from Russell Simmons. You know he’s big into meditation, reasonably successful Icon. He’s like, “if you don’t have time to meditate for 30 minutes, you need to be meditating for three hours.”

Chris: Yeah.

Dr. Greg Wells: So, like seriously, it’s like one of those things that if you just take the time, you schedule it in, you’ll gain that time back exponentially and just make it part of your practice and you’ll be blown away at what occurs.

[00:36:21]

Chris: It’s because it’s not the time, it’s the amount you get done in that time, right? Like I think people hear this and say oh but it’s going to take 30 minutes and I say what would take you three hours, after you’ve meditated, it’s only going to take you an hour and so you get it back. Because you are so much more clear and focused. And here’s something else I find as well. I wonder if this is the same for you. After meditating, sometimes my to-do list changes.

Dr. Greg Wells: [laughs] Absolutely!

Chris:  I’m like, I don’t want to do that, I don’t need to do that anymore because I can just do this, this way. It’s like, oh gosh, it’s so, so important.

Dr. Greg Wells: Yeah. You’re to-do list changes. Items become, you look at them like, “That’s totally irrelevant. That has nothing to do with what I’m trying to accomplish in my life. Why did I even write that down?” It’s just incredible on how your perspective is able to shift towards your priorities. And there’s another really big thing that I think entrepreneurs need to be aware of is that, time management is completely archaic. We need priority management. Priority management, and even maybe energy management.

Dr. Greg Wells: We’re managing our priorities, we are going to be able to achieve what we want to achieve. If you’re managing your time, you’re already losing the game. We need to not be worried about ticking things off and being busy.  We need to be spending our mental and physical energy on the things that are going to make the biggest difference in our lives in a year, three years, five years.

[00:37:52]

Dr. Greg Wells: And I totally believe that meditation enables you to do that along with your workouts. And we do talk sometimes about biohacks. Another way to combine things is that you can do meditation while you are doing rhythmic, physical activities. So for example, walking, swimming, biking, rowing, anything that has a rhythmical component to it. If you are like, don’t watch television while you’re at the gym or anything like that. But if you’re out for a walk, you can meditate while walking. If you are on the train or on a bike and you’re spinning your legs, you can close your eyes, you can meditate. That’s really wild if you do that. So there is ways of amplifying. It’s called muscular meditation, a super powerful technique.

Dr. Greg Wells: And there’s another thing called the MAP workout.  The mental and physical. It’s been used to treat Schizophrenia, to treat depression, and to treat anxiety. And what that is, is 20 minutes of physical activity, either aerobic or yoga followed by 20 minutes of meditation.  And putting them back to back, appears to have an amplifier effect on benefits for gray matter in the brain and mental health. So there’s this, it’s why I wrote the book, The Ripple Effect. All about these amplifiers of what happens when you put things together. So there’s that as well if you are sort of in a crunch, oh I don’t have time. Well you know what, do 20 minutes of walking or 20 minutes on the treadmill and jump off and do 20 minutes of meditation. You’ll get some really interesting looks at the gym by the way if you do that. But you know everyone is getting into it these days so people will ask you what you’re doing and how to do it themselves.

Chris: Yeah. Don’t be worried about the interesting looks, just be worried about getting…

Dr. Greg Wells:  Actually, the more interesting looks you get, the more likely you are doing something right, so.

[00:39:35]

Chris: And I love your little piece there on time management because it’s not focus on the time management, but it’s really what you get done.  It’s how you push the ball down the field, it’s how you actually move forward and having this potential being the healthiest, most vibrant you can be is definitely in that 20% that makes all the difference which is.

Chris: Man, we’ve gone overtime and we normally like to keep this nice and short but the reason why we did that listeners is because I have just been siting here enjoying it. I just looked at the clock now and, “oh wow, look at that,” so. I appreciate your extra time, man.

[00:40:11]

Chris: But let me ask you a couple of questions and so—I still have so much I didn’t get to ask you about. I mean, I wanted to hear about your bounce back from your neck injury. I wanted to hear about some of the amazing things you’ve done. So I think, Greg, if it’s okay with you, we are going to have to get you back on at some point because there is so much I want to learn.

Dr. Greg Wells: Yeah. Let’s do a part two for sure. Yeah, there is lots of fun stuff that’s happening and some great stories and the reality is, this is not easy. This is a long, long, long process and if anyone thinks they can do this in a week. Like I’m 46, I’m still learning. I broke my neck when I was 15 and that’s sort of when I started this journey with 31 years in. So there’s no rush. Let’s do it again for sure and we’ll keep diving deep.

Chris: I would love to. Let me just ask a couple of things. Firstly, if any of you want to find out more from Greg, I think you go to www.drgregwells.com but is there anywhere else that they should go to to get more information or learn about what you do.

Dr. Greg Wells: Yeah, www.drgregwells.com is sort of the home. We do try to put stuff out on Twitter and Facebook. I’m directing my attention a lot on SnapChat just to share what happens on a daily basis so if people want to check all that stuff out, we would love to connect and so I sort of put information on Facebook and Twitter. We try to put deeper articles and podcasts on LinkedIn and then the database stuff is going to go on Snapchat. So any of those we’d love to connect with you guys.

Chris: Perfect. And we’ll put all that in the show notes.

[00:41:49]

Chris: I have two questions I’ve asked everybody every time they’re on the show and here they are. The first one is this. As if today you’ve lost it all. You’ve lost all the relationships, all the money, the business, everything and you had to start from scratch.  How would you start today?

Dr. Greg Wells: I would—funny you asked that. That’s sort of been a mental exercise I’m playing over and over and over again for a year now and it’s sort of deliberate. Like I do sort of two things. One, I thought if I lost everything in my career what would happen and then second thought is, that I deliberately playing with is if I had absolutely no money, what would I need in order to survive. And it’s an important question for people to ask because, when you answer those questions, you realize how little you need to actually live and it liberates you to take risks. Start from scratch, you realize that if you’re not doing what you love, or what your purpose is, how easy it is to make a decision to actually just go do what you want to do—which is sort of the process I’m going through at the moment. Sort of on an ongoing basis.

Dr. Greg Wells: But, what would I do? I would probably, you know the thing that I love the most right now is having an impact in helping people live healthier so that they can reach their potential. So I like love public speaking and would probably go out and start very deliberately just doing little engagements wherever I had to to start getting the message out again and just 20 bucks at a time and put out the cup at the end and see what I can raise. Yeah, that all comes down to what’s your unique ability, what do you love doing. What are you doing that gives you energy? If you can identify that, then you’re free and clear. How little do you need to live?

Dr. Greg Wells: Like what do you actually need to live. I love riding my bike. I love going for a swim. I love playing with my kids. I don’t need a lot in order to be ultra-super happy and that’s a pretty liberating thought if you can get there.

[00:43:45]

Chris: It is pretty liberating. Here’s the second part of the question. If you were to go back to the beginning of the entrepreneur journey, right back to the start, and you were able to sit down with your old version of you and you had two minutes to share some advice, what advice would you give?

Dr. Greg Wells: Get more help sooner. That’s probably the biggest thing, honestly. Like just stop doing it all yourself. You don’t have to do it all by yourself. Get help. And guys like Alex Charfen had taught me that a lot. And I know that you’re in his office right now and we’re sort of speaking with each other from opposite ends of the continent but like that’s the biggest ones. Like get good help. Find teammates and build it. You don’t have to do it all by yourself. In fact, you’re better off not doing it all by yourself.

Chris: What great advice, Greg.

[00:44:31]

Chris: It’s been such a pleasure to get to know you today. I cannot wait for episode II. We’ll get that organized because I really want to go deeper on a lot of these things. Still have about five things just circled here from our conversation that I would love to explore with you but thank you for your time. I know it’s the most valuable resource and I hope the listeners out there got a lot from this because I sure did. So thank you very much.

Dr. Greg Wells: Yeah, I know. Thanks so much. It’s assume to connect and yeah I cannot wait to chat with your audience on Twitter or Facebook, whatever. Just hit me up and we’ll start the Convo.

Chris: So let’s just get over to that. All the links are in the show notes. Thank you for listening. Make sure you subscribe and share this episode and we will see you on the very next show. Bye for now.

—

Hey, it’s Chris, thank you so much for the Freedom fast track podcast episode. You are the reason we do it. I would love to hear your feedback. I would love to be your support. So please rate the show. Please share with your friends. It’s the only reason we do it is to get more people living virtually free. To travel the world, make more money, have more time off, and do more of what they love. If you want to increase your freedom, if you want to make more money, if you want to have more time doing what you love, get over to Christophermduncan.com. There’s free training, gifts, and updates on how you can be expanding your business and expanding your freedom.

Again thank you so much. Please rate and subscribe the show and hit over to that site right now so you can get started on your journey to total freedom.

00:00:28- Chris:   What’s up Total Freedom podcast. It’s Chris Duncan your host here, and I’m excited. Today I have the founder of The Rich20Something Community, the Facebook group that we’re all part of. It’s Daniel Dipiazza and he is right here with me and I’m excited bro. I’ve seen your stuff online, I’ve been in your group. I’ve had people tell me that I need to have you on the show. They always say “you know this guy?” And I’m like “I was living in Venice and now I’m on the show”. It’s great to finally connect with you man so welcome and thank you.

00:00:53- Daniel:              You were living in Venice?

00:00:55- Chris:                 Yeah dude.

00:00:56- Daniel:              You’re a freak like me then.

00:00:58- Chris:                 [Laughing]

00:01:03- Daniel:              Venice is like Santa Monica plus The Walking Dead. Everyone is here and it’s very expensive but also everyone is a little crazy.

00:01:15- Chris:                 There’s something really cool about that area and here’s what it is; it’s this mix of people who are super heart-centered artistic but also business minded. It’s one of the weirdest but coolest communities. Just south of Santa Monica, just [inaudible 00:01:25] and we lived there I think for half of a year, maybe a little bit longer. It was awesome.

Brother let’s start off with this because, I don’t know how, but there might be some people listening to this that don’t know who you are and know your story. Let’s go into your story, how it began and where you are now. I’ll leave it to you to fill us all in.

00:01:47- Daniel:              I can give my elevator pitch, how about that?

00:01:48- Chris:                 Okay.

00:01:50- Daniel:              Let’s say that we’re in an elevator and we’re going up to the top floor and I only have seven floors to pitch you, and you’re like “hey, what’s Rich20Something?” I stole this from a friend of mine. His name is Mark Goldstein and he’s a clinical psychologist and he’s really good with words. I stole this from him. This is how I position it now.

00:12:12- Daniel:              You know what ORI is right?

00:02:15- Chris:                 Yes.

00:02:16- Daniel:              Return on investment, that’s a dummy question, of course you know what ORI is. At Rich20Something we focus on ROT; Return on your twenties. We’ve helped people between 18 and 30 get the biggest return on what we think is the most important decade of your life. It’s an overlooked decade because a lot of the common mythology of your twenties is, “this is the period of complete freedom”, “this is the period where nothing matters”.

The approach that we take to it is “this is a very important decade for your life because it’s going to set up your 30s, 40s and 50s”. It all comes back down to now so we are helping you to figure out how to master your money, your mindset and your ability to make a difference, to make an impact. That was crisp. We do that through online courses and we have live events that we’re doing now, I have a book that’s coming out and we also have B to B sides. We’re really growing that way but that’s the … now we’re at the top floor and now you have to get off and go to your office.

00:03:23- Chris:                 I’m sold brother, I’m all in. That’s such a great point because I think a lot of us just float through Uni and don’t get started. My first business was at 17 so I’m the crazy kind that’s just been doing this the whole way through.

Let me ask you this; no one ever lands on top of the mountain, where did you start and what was the journey?

00:03:45- Daniel:              I think that one, I’m not sure if I’m top of any mountain but I think that the most interesting thing is that I started just completely, completely lost. A couple of years ago now, about five, six years ago. I was working at a restaurant and I was just really upset because I felt like I was in a very difficult situation. I had already finished university and I knew I didn’t want to go back and do more. I didn’t see anything that enticed me enough to want to spend the money to go back to school, but at the same time I wasn’t really interested in doing the corporate thing. I have some friends who were doing great in corporate America it’s just not really for me.

00:04:29- Daniel:              So I was stuck because I felt “If I don’t want to do one of those two options I’m going to have to pick these shit jobs”. I was like “I might as well try to figure out how to do something myself. I might as well try to figure out how to make my own, maybe there’s a way”. I didn’t know anything about internet marketing, I didn’t know anything about any of that stuff, but I just started cataloguing my skills and the first business I started was as a test prep coach, as a tutor.

00:04:48- Daniel:              So we have this test, it’s the SAT, it helps you get into college. I’m really good at these tests and really good at tests. I started teaching this to students, that grew. That model worked. I started writing about how it was working and then eventually I started trying other things, doing some of the same approaches I learned when I was refining my methods. I started a web design business and a bunch of other businesses on the side. Multi central consulting. As I started writing about these things, I got picked up by Forbes, Fortune and Time Magazine and eventually it came to a point where I was getting less people asking me to perform the service and more people asking me to tell them how I was able to perform the service.

From that; Rich20Something which is a combination of personal experience plus the community, it’s been built around. Teaching how to do things for yourself without having to work for someone else.

00:05:03- Chris:                 I love it brother and what a great way to just have it unfold. What a great way for it to unfold and I love one thing you said in there, you had a look at your skills and you looked at all the things you could do and then started a business around something you could do. I always say to people the fastest way to start is consulting.

Let’s talk to the person right now that’s listening; they’re in their 20s, they’ve done what both you and I did, went to university and came out the other side going “what the heck was that about? And now I actually have to get a real job”. I remember being at uni and all my friends, two who had finished, a few years older than me said “stay in university [crosstalk 00:06:24] when you leave”. Let’s talk to that person, they’re thinking about starting a job, how do they start? What do they look at and what advice would you give them?

00:06:36- Daniel:              You mean when they’re about to graduate?

00:06:38- Chris:                 Yeah.

00:06:42- Daniel:              Look, hopefully the person listening to this, we get to them early enough where they can seriously consider not going to school. I have a lot of young people in my community and they ask me “should I go to high school?”, of course you should go to high school, of course. No question. But at the time when you’re going to college, you’re still trying to figure out who you are and what college does is it forces you to put yourself in a box. “I want to major in this, I want to classify myself as that” and during that time period, I don’t know about you, but you’re going to go back and forth between a lots of things that you think might be a good fit and ultimately a lot of times it ends up to being not very satisfying.

00:07:25- Daniel:              It’s easy to come out of college after four years, and the state’s probably in debt and still have no idea what you’re going to do. So I think the first thing is, take a step back from school. Even if you’re in school right now, you’re about to graduate, take a step back from what you actually learned in school, if you learned anything. Take a step back from what your classwork was and think “What skills do I actually have? What skills did I gain either from being in Uni or from just living my life? Do I have hobbies? Do I have talents? Are there things that people constantly ask me for advice on? Do people come to me to ask for help in a specific area?”.

00:08:01- Daniel:              Really take a hard inquiry into what it is that the world has been telling you, and if it hasn’t been telling you anything, if you’re not necessarily good at something, think about developing a skill. College a lot of times creates a lot of learning and a lot of knowledge but then it doesn’t really transfer a lot of skills. So if you don’t have any skills, you have to now take the initiative to build a skill. That really doesn’t sound very appealing to a lot of people because you think “well I’ve been in college for four years, why would I go out and learn … I’m just making something up … web design? Why would I learn that?”. Well because it’s something that you can directly exchange for money. You can’t with a degree.

What the degree used to be was a signifier of a level of intelligence that says “I’m going to go to a corporate job. I have this piece of paper and because I have this they’re going to know that I’m qualified to handle the tasks”. But it’s not a declaration that you can actually do anything. So unless you’re going to school to be a doctor, or an attorney where you know that the next step is more school and you have to do that, you have to really think “what skills do I have?”. If you don’t have skills, you have to get some.

00:19:15- Chris:                 Literally. And it doesn’t matter what it is. I always [inaudible 00:09:17] people start off with a service instead of going into a product. [crosstalk 00:09:21]

00:09:24- Daniel:              It’s easier, because there’s no start up costs. You can fumble you’re way along, you can do free work in the beginning to get some referrals and some experience. It’s just easier. Mow lawns, I really don’t care seriously. A lot of the things that you’ll do with clients, that experience will transfer over no matter what service you’re providing.

00:09:45- Chris:                 And it’s huge and one of the things I think that’s important about that is how quickly that you’ve gone and said “let’s get started”. Typically, and same with you, same with me, same with many other people that have made millions of dollars, travelled the world and didn’t do that things they wanted to do in their 20s, is the first business isn’t their last business.

00:10:03- Daniel:              No, no way man.

00:10:04- Chris:                 But see you’re like “no, no way” but most people, they get this thing … and I want to address it, and I know that you’ve got some content on this … so many people are worried about starting because they think it’s going to be the one that they chose forever.

00:10:22- Daniel:              Here’s the thing, business is mostly just practice. You’re always learning and you’re always growing and you’re right it really is a stumbling block. People think “I want to pick the perfect business” because we view businesses as we view jobs. But think about the way a career work. Usually with a career, especially coming out of college, you pick a career field let’s say … take someone like my mum. My mum is in the insurance industry, she’s an insurance adjuster. Every five to seven years she gets some sort of either vertical or lateral promotion where she moves ups the ladder and becomes a manager of more managers or she moves to another company that pays her more for doing the same thing.

00:11:06- Daniel:              We look at entrepreneurship, a lot of us to an experienced (I was too at one point), we look at entrepreneurship in the same type of moving-up-the-ladder-way where “I’ll start the business one way and then I’ll just make that business bigger”. Sometimes that’s how it goes but most often the first four, five, six, multiple businesses; they’re just going to be things that you test, things that you learn with, things where you incorporate skills, build relationships, make some money to leverage yourself into the next business. It’s not necessarily a linear process like we view careers.

00:11:40- Daniel:              Part of that though causes anxiety because we like linearity, we like things that are straight forward and easy to discern. As entrepreneur, and you know this since you’ve been doing this since you were 17, you have to be comfortable with being able to see a few steps in front of you but not necessarily have the whole picture in mind. And that’s where it comes into play, that what you’re doing right now might not be what you’re doing in five years and you have to be okay with that.

00:12:03- Chris:                 And when you are okay with that, you can move. Those people don’t move, they don’t start because there’s one thing. They want to be perfect and they have this fear. This fear of losing, this fear of starting, I think it’s ingrained in us with school. You’ve got a book coming out right?

00:12:17- Daniel:              Yeah. Check this out this is 1 of 27 copies that exist in the world that [inaudible 00:12:22] put on my face.

00:12:26- Chris:                 What is the title?

00:12:30- Daniel:              I’ll let you read it.

00:12:31- Chris:                 Ditch Your Average Job Start An Epic Business And Score The Life You Want?

00:12:36- Daniel:              Rich 20-Something. Perfect example, this is something that- I started writing two years ago but five years ago I didn’t know I was going to write a book and you take things one step at a time. The book is similar to our discussion as I’m talking about progressing from being unsure to starting one thing to leveraging that into another thing. The book chronicles that, and distills lessons from it with actionable step-by-step things and combines those with some of my close friends who have now done the same.

00:13:13- Daniel:              I want to add something too; you start off doing … I was teaching SAT, I was literally tutoring. There’s no logical connection between tutoring someone in Math and Reading and now running an internet based business that’s making millions of dollars that does consulting and does products. There’s no connection but I had to start tutoring Math to get to the point where I could now write this book and have that business. Like you said, no one falls on top of the mountain. So whatever you’re thinking right now, you’re watching this and it’s your first time thinking about going into business for yourself or you’re unsure … it doesn’t actually matter what the first thing is as long you do the first thing.

00:14:01- Chris:                 Literally, you cannot … say Job sitter, you cannot connect the dots looking backwards.

00:15:10- Chris:                 You talk about some lessons and stuff in your book, would you like to share some lessons or some things for our audience that you think is important?

00:15:16- Daniel:              I’ll share one with you that I think is powerful. We met through our mutual friend Jared Kleinert …

00:15:26- Chris:                 Man, props to Jared I love that guy.

00:15:27- Daniel:              Jared is a super connector, really is. He’s like the center of the hub. He’s like the hub in a world of spokes. What I learned pretty early on is that a lot of the opportunities that you’re going to get come from crucial connections. Honestly, between the business being what it is now and the book deal and all this stuff, I could probably trace that back to five really influential people. Of course, it worked on my part and there’s been a little bit of luck, everybody gets a little bit of luck, but probably like five people.

00:16:09- Daniel:              I learned this early on when I was just starting off, I realized that a lot of these people who were doing well end up becoming friends with each other and so that’s how networks build. So what I do is I make an effort to meet people, like yourself, and we have this podcast and afterwards I say “Chris, that was really great, who else do you know that I should meet?” I would ask the friends I was making to introduce me to other friends who are like them and that way I’ve build kind of a curated network of people who care about the things I care about. Who are connected in the way I want to be connected and I use each relationship as a focal point to find new relationships. A lot of times people say “I don’t know where to find these kinds of people, I don’t know how to get a mentor”.

This is a big thing in the millennial community right now. How old are you brother are you 28, 29, 30?

00:17:03- Chris:                 29.

00:17:04- Daniel:              29 okay. You’ll know then, you’re a millennial. I’m 28, I’ll be 29 this year. A big thing for us right now, especially with the younger Millennials like 25 and below, maybe that’s Generation Z, they’re really obsessed with mentors right now. Everyone wants a mentor. You don’t necessarily need one mentor but you can get a lot of different people to help you out in a lot of different areas and that’s how you do it. You start by getting yourself out there, by going to events, by going to where interesting people are, talking with them and then saying “you’re awesome, who else should I know like you?” And they’ll do the work for you. Through that you’ll- over time, build good relationships and you’ll be very surprised the interesting- sometimes just crazy things that come from seemingly innocuous connections several years later.

00:17:50- Chris:                 It’s such a massive tip. It’s literally one of the biggest growth hacks out there. You never know because the thing is, and you said it really off cuff, is going to those events. You’re like “oh yeah go to some events” but one of the things that changed my life has been events. Seminars, workshops, mentoring, going and connecting and the easiest place to find like minded people is at those damn events.

0:18:14- Daniel:                 Totally. I have a friend, I’m always calling them like that but I’m using it as an example, but I have a friend and he’s a really talented graphic designer and video artist. He’s like “I can’t get any work. I can’t get people to pay me for the work and I’m looking for clients”, but he’s at his house all the time on the computer and I’m like “motherfucker” … I don’t know if can curse here … “dude, go to places where people are”.

00:18:45- Daniel:              Most of the people who I’m friends with, I would say a large majority of them, I’ve met in person at least once. A lot of them I met just off the cuff, like you said. Two weekends ago I went to a maple syrup testing down in Burbank in California, for no reason. Just because I saw it as an event on my Facebook events and I’m like “I’ll go to this”. I just go to stuff to see who’s there and then meet people. That’s not like necessarily a great place to meet entrepreneurs but the idea is putting yourself out there. Going to places where other interesting people are going to be and be a human because we’re so obsessed now with “how do I grow followers? I need to get people to notice me on the internet”. But people care about you a lot more in person.

00:19:30-Daniel:               I’m doing this book thing right now and the majority of people I’ve asked to help me with, I’ve met them in person multiple times and now [inaudible 00:19:37]. I’m like “I need you help” and they’re going to do it.

00:19:43- Chris:                 That’s so badass.

00:19:46- Daniel:              They’re going to do it. We’re going number one New York Times Bestseller, not just New York Times Bestseller, number one New York Times. Number one, uno.

00:19:55- Chris:                 I was talking to a guy last night who’s done New York Times, Bestseller 88 times in a row and I should introduce you to him.

00:20:02- Daniel:              What category is he in? I want get whatever category he’s in.

00:20:06- Chris:                 It’s not the category, he’s worked with [crosstalk 00:20:07] right through to … who was he talking about … anyway I will introduce you to Michael after this. There you go and guess what just happened just then.

00:20:19- Daniel:              Yeah, you see that?

00:20:20- Chris:                 We just witnessed the power of connections. Last time- because I’m right New York Times Bestseller right now as well so I’ve just hired the number one consultant in the country-

00:20:29- Daniel:              [inaudible 00:20:26] Ryan?

00:20:29- Chris:                 His name’s Michael Drew and he’s-

00:20:31- Daniel:              Nice.

00:20:32- Chris:                 I can introduce you and he’s done it 88 times in a row. I’m going to be 89 because there’s this system and this is what’s fascinating … if you can see us on video or if you’re watching this, or listening to this on a recording … what just happened is going to explode Daniel’s business. This is done, it’s insane. And this is what I think you’ve been talking about brother. We’ll do that after the call, I’ll intro you that’s no problem.

00:20:57- Chris:                 Let’s talk about your book because I’m sure people need to go get it. Why should they get the book? What’s different about the book? Why do we need another book on that topic? Didn’t Tim Ferris do it all?

00:21:05- Daniel:              Well first of all there’s a whole of bunch of nudes right in the middle of it. You can’t get those anywhere online.

00:21:13- Chris:                 A whole bunch of what?

00:21:14- Daniel:              Nudes, nude photographs of me.

00:21:15- Chris:                 Oh okay great. I was like what?

00:21:14- Daniel:              [inaudible 00:21:23] and Tim Ferris’ book is great. Tim’s a good guy and his book is great but two things are missing from that equation in my estimation. One, that book was written originally in 2008. Times have definitely changed since then, in that decade, and Millennials feel like, “now that their so many people in entrepreneurship it’s harder and harder to get noticed”. When Tim was writing his book, he was writing at a time when entrepreneurship was still not as much public awareness. Now entrepreneurship is it’s own trend. You can be in the business of talking about business now, which is a new thing.

We take it from the perspective of “look, entrepreneurship and that whole fad, that whole trend is already here. Here’s how to still get in, it’s not too late and we go through a step-by-step process. Also I think one thing that’s really relatable about the book is that I talk a lot from a very personal perspective.

00:22:30- Daniel:              You alluded to this earlier about falling on the mountain top, I think it’s so funny that people see me as some sort of guru. In fact, just as a joke with myself, I allowed the publisher to call me a guru in the description just to fuck with people. Because I totally don’t believe I’m a guru, I think I’m always learning and I think that it’s really eye-opening to see and hear the experiences of a normal person doing extraordinary things including all the bad stuff, which is in the book. All the bad stuff, all the heartache, all the expectations that got crushed, mine along with about 10 other friends who I allowed to write essays in the book, who have done really well.

00:23:21- Daniel:              It’s just a fantastic resource, not just for tactical knowledge, but for reminding yourself that it’s possible. And we all need that.

00:23:28- Chris:                 Right on brother I love it. I highly recommend it, everyone’s going to go out there and get it because books, workshops … when you get the book to number one, I’ve got a system to help you get there but we can still get you there.

00:23:41- Chris:                 Here’s one thing I’m interested in; I’ve successfully scaled to multi-millions a few times but I’m always curious, because a lot of people don’t get there and you have as well, you alluded to it before, what was the difference? What was the difference between the Daniel who was at six figures and struggling to making the multiple millions? I would love for you to share.

00:24:03- Daniel:              Two things. First of all six figures for most people isn’t struggling. Most people would love to make six figures independently.

00:24:13- Chris:                 Let me just say six figures revenue because we both know six figures revenue isn’t six figures in your bank.

00:24:20- Daniel:              I gotcha, totally. Two things; one was really ramping up the brand leadership. Really becoming a fault leader. Writing for places like Entrepreneur Forbes, Fortune, Inc., Time, all those places might seem like a cool little trophy but what they allow me to do was they allowed me to scale the business on the B-to-B side.

00:24:44- Daniel:              We have our products which work really well and they’re doing great, but we were missing something and once we added the service side … because for a while I started my business doing services and then once I got good at doing services I thought “fuck it I’m just going to do only products”. For a while I was doing that and it was doing okay but I realized “something’s missing. I feel like I could be making a lot more and I don’t know what’s missing”. Once I added services back into the mix, it just took off because the services … because of all the credibility I had built around the places I’d been writing and things I’d been doing … the services we were able to charge a good amount of money for so that instantly increased our revenue. Plus it allowed me to pour back into the courses and those two combined synergistically worked to take us to seven figures plus.

00:25:26- Chris:                 Nice. So to summarize that it was first really getting the authority and the notoriety by going onto some big publications. That helped to really grow that. And then the second was, I guess it was adding more services that allowed you to get over that threshold.

00:25:44- Daniel:              Think about it, if you have five clients that are doing multiple seven figures, paying you seven to 10,000 dollars a month just to create content for them, manage their social media and just help them build their brand. For them, it’s not too expensive, it’s totally doable they’re not [inaudible 00:26:04] and you feel good about it, it’s comfortable. If you have 10 of those clients now you’re making 70-80,000 dollars a month, that pretty much take care of it. And then you pour that back into the products, the products do better, so everyone wins. It’s like, rather than thinking about trying to sell a million things for a dollar, how can I sell just a few things at a much higher price?

00:26:26-Daniel:               Everyone has different models though. That’s not necessarily the only model. Mcdonalds is making billions selling one dollar hamburgers, it’s fine. It’s just that we found it was easier.

00:26:37- Chris:                 I always tell people the easiest way to a million is a thousand thousands, 500 200s a month. It’s very simple and I wish people would always understand this. Check out this number, if you can have 500 people paying you $167 a month, that’s a million dollars. I think people sometimes just don’t understand how simple it actually is to get there and it’s exciting to talk to you about this but brother we’re about to wrap up. I feel like I found another soul brother, that we could just talk forever and I also like to keep these shows as short and impactful as possible. I’ll leave it to you on what last thing, impactful message, you’d like to leave with the tribe.

00:27:11- Daniel:              Okay.

00:27:13- Daniel:              Guys, focus. Listen here. Listen I’m a tell you something … everyone’s scared of starting and I’ll admit that starting can be scary, it can be onerous, it can be intimidating. But if you can get pass the starting point, pass those first 90 days, pass those initial first periods of resistance, it doesn’t get easier but the playing field gets much clearer. Everyone’s concerned that there are other people who are trying to take their ideas. There are too many people in the market for them to stand out, but I promise you no matter what you want to do whether you want to make business doing content, whether you want to be a service provider, whether you want to do products. If you can get pass that start up phase where everyone feels the intense pressure to stand out, eventually there’s a space for you. And if you keep pushing you’ll find it too. It’s not as crowded up the top, just keep pushing.

00:28:20- Chris:                 Nice words brother, I love it. It is true. I appreciate your time, time is the most important currency to me so thankful for spending some time here with us and everybody please go out and rush and buy his book. I highly recommend it. I think that just from what you’ve shared today in just this short interaction I’ve had that I know there’s going to be some gold nuggets that you’ve put in there which is just awesome. Everybody go grab that.

00:28:43- Chris:                 If you want to know how to connect with Daniel, you want to stalk him on the internet, anything he’s going to allow to give me, I’m going to put it on my website.

00:28:50- Daniel:              Rich20something.com/book. That’s where you need to go.

00:28:54- Chris:                 There you go, rich20something.com/book and that will be on the site plus everything else about how to track him down and find him and get those nude pics if that’s what you really want. Clearly right, bro?

00:29:07- Daniel:              Dude, I’m ripped! I’m ripped! You need them.

00:29:14- Chris:                 Listeners we love you so much. Live with total freedom, free your mind, free your life, free you time and do it right now. Go out there and smash it. Do what matters most. Like, subscribe, share this.

Daniel, love you brother and will catch you on the next episode. Peace.

Chris: Welcome back to The Total Freedom Show. My name’s Christopher Duncan. I’m here with a new friend. Someone I think I’m really going to connect with. We have a mutual friend, like many of my guests, and Govindh Jayaraman is here with me. Govindh, I’m excited because one of close friends has said to me, “That guy is like the modern day Napoleon Hill. He’s going out there creating some awesome change,” so thank you for joining on the show and welcome.

[00:00:52]

Govindh: Thank you, Chris. That mutual friend said that to me too, and it makes me blush. It’s a great thing because Napoleon Hill, to me, is the person who created the original movement around people manifesting what they want in their hearts and seeing it come to life. The one thing that I think is radically changed from when Napoleon Hill wrote the book, which was “Think and Grow Rich”, is our definition of rich has changed.

Govindh: Our definition of rich and wealthy has changed over time and I think that what my work does and the movement that I’ve created around my work is entirely based on the fact that wealth is measured in more than just financial terms today. It can be your impact on other people, it can be your place in the world, where do you leave your community after you’ve left? All those things that the bigger cause, the higher purpose for which you serve, the people for which you serve, all of those things can be part of what we consider to be wealthy today.

[00:01:54]

Chris: Right. Right. It was such a good book. I don’t know many people who are, quote unquote, successful that haven’t stumbled across it or looked at it, especially in the business and entrepreneur world.

Chris: Let’s start off by finding what is it that you’re really focused on now? I know that you’ve had a varied background but what is the thing that you’re really excited and focused on now?

Govindh: Well, it’s the same thing that I think, and it’s growing people. It sounds very simple. It’s the small changes that make a big difference so that together we can change the world and if I can help people unlock that small change, whether that’s in my teams, in my company, the people that are in my company and if I can help make a small change, if it’s people out there in the world, other entrepreneurs, people on your show, Chris, if it’s those people that can make a small change, I believe that we can collaborate and inspire to create a better world by all doing these small changes together.

Chris: I couldn’t agree with anything more than that sentence. It basically sums up my whole being right now and I massively appreciate that. You’re an author, a speaker, you’re doing so many different things, your book, “Paper Napkin”, looks amazing. I can’t wait to read it but where did you start from? What’s the journey? Nobody gets to where you are in one jump. I would love to hear about the journey and maybe some of the ups and downs.

[00:03:16]

Govindh: Chris, you said no one gets there in one jump. I don’t think anybody gets there in one fall either. I think one of the things that we … The greatest quote I ever heard on stage about any speaker ever was an entrepreneur, he’s a famous guy and I’m not really fond of him but his name is Kevin O’Leary. He’s on Shark Tank, he’s the dragon up here in Canada and he said the best thing I’ve ever heard a keynote ever start with, he said, “Successful entrepreneurs owe it to the next generation of entrepreneurs to pay forward their failures, not their successes.”

Govindh: I was like, “Whoa, this is going to be amazing. This speech is going to be the best ever,” and then he just shined his head for the next forty five minutes. I mean, he just literally told us how great he was. He never shared any of those things. Why I share that story off the top is because my journey as an entrepreneur started looking for other people, other entrepreneurs and it was such a joke, actually, even when I was in high school.

Govindh: I was in high school and my idols … Everybody else had pictures of hot girls on the back of their doors. I had those but the articles that I read were all about entrepreneurs and I’d read things in the paper and there was this one entrepreneur, this local entrepreneur, from my city, Ottawa, Canada, who went on to do really big things but he was an uneducated guy from a town called Ontario and his name was Robert Campeau. His company, Campeau Corporation, built repeatedly the best houses that have ever been built in my city.

[00:04:49]

Govindh: To this day, when people buy a Campo house, it’s like, “Wow. That’s a well-built house.” He said this thing years ago that just captured my imagination. He said, “You have to understand I’m a perfectionist about my houses because I employ hundreds of people and they take care of thousands of people and because I’m responsible for them, we have a high standard about what we do.”

Govindh: I was like, “Whoa. I want that responsibility.” I was like, hand up, “I want to do that. I want to be that. I want to make that difference. I want to,” so I started sort of stalking him, the way that people did back then which is cut out articles in the paper and send him hand-written notes that said, “Hey, I’d really love to meet you,” and I met him as a sixteen year old. I drove to his house. He had this twenty five million dollar mansion and-

Chris: Wow.

Govindh: He met me and I went for lunch with him in a strip mall food court. It was bizarre-o. My journey started really looking at the stars and saying, “Hey, how do I make that impact in the world and how do I align with that? How do I get into that world?” Then, I joined [inaudible 00:06:03], I went to school like you’re supposed to and I went to university like you’re supposed to and in university, everybody was playing Vice President and President, right? In our business school, not unlike any other business school, we have all these textbooks and it says, “Okay. You’re Vice President or President of this organization. What are the decisions you make?”

[00:06:23]

Govindh: They don’t tell you anything about the path. They don’t tell you how you get to that way. I decided to start an organization called “The Entrepreneurs’ Club” and, ironically, today they’re going to celebrate their twenty fifth annual business dinner. We founded this business dinner where we put people next to professionals in the fields they wanted to be in and now I wanted to be an entrepreneur so I surrounded myself with entrepreneurs, people who created things. This was my opportunity to get in that group, right?

Chris: Wow.

Govindh: Get in with them.

Chris: Right.

Govindh: Then, I started a painting company but not just any painting company. I started one of those student painting franchises, again, because I wanted to learn from people who had done that before. I knew that there were things I needed to learn but I wanted to learn it from people who were like me. My journey always started out with, “How do I get around the people who are way more successful than me?” Right? “But are doing exactly what I want to be doing?”

[00:07:16]

Govindh: It just so happened that the organization that I met up with at the time was called “Student Painters” and then turned into “Student Works”. The guy who was the President of the company at the time, his whole mission in life, get this alignment, Chris, like you and I were talking about alignment before and how we’re like kindred spirits and the person who introduced us was also a part of that. We all share a heart, we share this pulse that we have with the world and we really are connected to that. This guy, his mission is to create entrepreneurs. He does this painting thing so that he can show people how they can take control of their life, how they can understand that they are their number one asset and by holding onto the wheel, they can steer where they want to go.

Chris: Wow.

Govindh: He’s done it for hundreds of people, hundreds of people, over the years. Amazing, right? My journey started with a paint brush as an entrepreneur and I became a student painter and did really well in my first year and learned a very valuable lesson that year: that success is an awful teacher.

Chris: Yes, it is.

Govindh: I got pretty excited about how smart I was because I did so well and set a bunch of records and did it very profitably and I didn’t hesitate to tell everybody that I had figured it out. Life has a way of throwing a few challenges along the way after that. The ditches that followed, I think, is really where I did some work.

[00:08:43]

Chris: That’s really interesting. There’s a few things that you’ve said there that I want to explore and the first one is the question that you ask yourself. I think that in life we’re defined by the questions we ask more than the answers that we seem to be given and the question you asked and I think it’s important, which is, “How do I make my impact?” I think that’s such a good question and it’s going to lead people to a different way. Now, people think about entrepreneurs who aren’t entrepreneurs who make a lot of money. Sometimes they think of us the wrong way.

[00:09:14]

Chris: I would like you to explore that question and what’s the truth about being an entrepreneur? Is it really about making an impact or is it like what we see maybe in the Oval Office? Just about making all the money and having other people suffer. What’s it truly for you? In your opinion, what’s the truth about being an entrepreneur?

Govindh: I think the truth about entrepreneurship and I think the thing that drives that entrepreneur gene or that entrepreneur stance within all of our souls, the thing is that we can’t help but try to leave a legacy. When we think about legacy, legacy is the cumulative effect of the love and faith that we have in things and people around us, right?

Govindh: Think about that for a second, Chris. That’s a big concept, right? Because I just said entrepreneurs are about love and I mean that because entrepreneurs, the whole sense of entrepreneurship … And I also want to come back to this in a second, because love is a tricky word and I want to come back to the word but I think that entrepreneur part of us, the thing that makes us do the things that we do, the uncommon things that we do and the uncommon results that we drive, is out of a love and a passion for things that can’t be quantified or seen until we see it and the legacy of its existence, its mere existence, is what we strive for. That occurs through people, through our faith and love for people that we can’t see or touch. It’s something that we can only realize after the fact.

[00:10:51]

Chris Duncan: That’s beautiful, brother. It’s like entrepreneurs are the true magicians. We really are. We’re the true artists. We see something, like this podcast, like your book, I saw it and now it’s here and I think it’s huge that you’ve just said that. That’s a big deal. Thank you.

Govindh: Yeah.

Chris: Yeah. Sorry?

Govindh: No, no, no. Yeah. Think about that thing of legacy. Legacy doesn’t mean “ego”, right?

Chris: No.

Govindh: It’s actually the opposite of ego. Legacy is the thing that exists without you, right? The great sayings of Confucius around leadership, “Good leaders are hated by those who follow. The great leaders are respected. The truly exceptional leaders, their follows say, ‘We couldn’t do it without them.’ But the best leaders? Their followers say that we could do it ourselves.” Right? The best entrepreneurs are almost invisible in the things that they do over time, right? Because the legacy is without them. That’s the power of it.

Govindh: I think that’s the thing that people forget is part of this and you said the creative part of it and the artistry and the magician part of it … I think that we’ve gotten wrapped up in this sense of entrepreneurship and needing to be this commercial thing and we talked off the top of Napoleon Hill, “Think and Grow Rich” to now. One of the great things that’s changed is our definition of what wealth is, what success is.

[00:12:18]

Govindh: I think maybe we all saw “It’s A Wonderful Life” and, at the end, saw the bells ring and cried and said, “Oh my gosh. You know? Wealth is in friendships. Wealth is in relationships. Wealth is the impact that you have on people who you don’t necessarily know how to measure.” That’s the legacy piece that we hunt for. That is an artisan piece. That is a magician. By its very nature, we are artisans but I think that sometimes we get trapped in that too, right? I think, as entrepreneurs, the word is a French word by origin. It means, “One who undertakes challenges.” I think we get wrapped up too much in this whole thing that we’ve got to be the one who undertakes challenges all the time. It doesn’t have to be that challenging all the time.

Govindh: The act of entrepreneurship doesn’t have to be this constant, “I’m going to be the one who takes on challenges.” After we create an organization, our roles have to necessarily change. We have to take on these other roles, right? CEO is one of them. Share Holder is one of them. We have to nurture the organization that supports all the people around us. That Robert Campeau quote off the top where I said he had to take care of the organization because that’s what supported everybody else around him.

[00:13:28]

Chris: Wow, brother. This is incredible. There are so many amazing things you just said and I just want to recap this all for the listeners. One thing I really got out of this is that leaders are invisible. What a massive, massive nugget that is because you’re so right, man. The amount of people that are out there just talking about how great they are but someone else is doing it. They’re too busy doing it. The other thing I loved was that legacy’s a thing that lasts without you. That felt so good. Huge, man!

Govindh: Huge. Think about that. Chris, just think. Close your mind right now and think of the people who are most important to you. Right? Who made you who you are and I’m not talking about the business, Chris. I’m talking about the human being, Chris. Are those people who are up on some podium, are those people who are celebrated in any place more significantly than your heart? Right?

Govindh: The reason why you’re able to do the things you do is because of that celebration that we feel for them, right? Because of the doors and there’s this really great idea and I got this off one of the conversations I had for “Paper Napkin Wisdom”, is this concept of leadership, that leadership is the person who opens the door and holds the door open for you to walk through. Again, it’s a thankless task. You’re the last person through the door, right?

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Govindh: We think about being that and I don’t mean doing the stuff that is associated with being a leader. I mean being a leader, truly being of service to the people around us, being a servant leader. If we’re really focused on being that and doing the things that’s consistent with being a certain leader, we will have the impact we want but if we’re focused on the impact, if we’re going to be out there with our YouTube videos and our Facebook videos, “Hey, look at me! Look at me! Look at me!”, being a great self-promoter, it’s going to be difficult to be that door opener.

[00:15:26]

Chris: Right. Right. What an insight because I feel that we’re in a tidal wave of people wanting to be it, not actually be doing it. It’s, “Hey, look here I am! Look what I’m doing.” They’re trying to shortcut stuff that you just can’t short cut.

Govindh : Yeah. “Look at what I have.” Somehow, by some magic, we’ve forgotten things like “Death of a Salesman”, right? When Arthur Miller wrote “Death of a Salesman”, he talked about this character who associated the externalities of success with actual true success. He forgot about his … He lost his way along that path. When we think about all those stories, all those great tragedies, all those great stories that teach us these things, I think we’ve forgotten about it. Now, in the ten, fifteen second veneer.

Govindh: I mean, Facebook measures success on a video by the number of your ten second views. Are you kidding me? A ten second view determines success on a video? No. What happened to connection? True connection? The connection that comes from eye-to-eye, belly to belly conversations, the ones like we’re having right now, right? That’s where we make impact, guys. That’s where we make connection. That takes longer than ten seconds and it’s awkward and it’s hard and it’s muddy and sometimes we don’t know what to say and we get it wrong. We might stall or stutter or get it wrong. That’s okay.

BREAK: [00:16:51]

[00:17:54]

Chris: Feels good to meet someone that’s talking about this and not just tactics. There’s a lot of depth in what you’re saying. I feel like we’re just kind of swimming across the surface. You mentioned your book, “Paper Napkin …?” What’s the-?

Govindh: “Paper Napkin Wisdom”.

Chris: — Last part? “Paper Napkin Wisdom”. I knew there was another thing but I’m just like listening to everything you’re saying. I’m kind of caught up in it. Would you share with our listeners a little bit about your book and where, maybe, they can get it? Not in a self-promotion way, of course, but just because I think, just based on what we’ve been talking about, I think it’s something that I want to read so I’d love to hear about it.

Govindh: Yeah. Chris, the book came out of one of those ditches in my life, right? Really. I found myself, after 2009, like a lot of people, in a lot of trouble, in a lot of hurt. My business was really hurting and I was in a ditch, six million dollars down, no way up but I had this idea and this notion, again, because I had always been surrounded by entrepreneurs, I had this idea that, “Hey, I heard someone whose been able to do this before,” right? “I think I can do it. I think I can get out of this. I think I can make this right.”

Govindh: I went around saying, “Hey, that trouble that you had, how did you solve it?” And no one answered that question really well. No one answers the question of, “How did you get out of the ditch?” Really well. Maybe it’s like a lot of things. When we go through pain, we tend not to remember the pain. We don’t remember the steps we took to get out of pain but we remember what we did afterwords so I’d hear a lot about what happened afterword but not a lot about what happened during. When you’ve got a knife to your throat, you’re on your knees, a gun to your head, what do you do first? Do you take the knife off your throat? Move the gun away? What do you do first? I didn’t know what that looked like.

[00:19:37]

Govindh: I think that … “Paper Napkin Wisdom” evolved from a place where I needed to figure out a way to get out of where I was and so I started asking people to write down their most important pearl of wisdom on a simple paper napkin and share it with me and then we’d talk about it. We’d have a conversation like the one you and I are having right now and I’d have a bunch of them and, after about a thousand napkins, I’m a slow study, Chris, took me about a thousand napkins, I started to recognize these patterns that were happening, you know? And their stories. The book is about that journey that I went on as I discovered patterns and it’s designed to take you and the reader on that same journey.

Govindh: It’s not a conventional book. It’s not, “Here’s your five-step plan to life and business success.” You’re just going to … Take a bath in it, wake up, take the shower and then go off and forget about it. That’s not what the book is about. The book is about something a little bit better than that. The book is designed on a weekly journey and you don’t have to do it every week but you do it sequentially where you go through every lesson I learned to help build, really, three essential muscles in your entrepreneur brain or your entrepreneur body, any way you want to look at it.

[00:20:55]

Govindh: There’s focus, alignment, action. Right? It really comes down to that: focus, align and act, FAA. In the book, with a co-author, Jack Daly, he’s scaled several hundred million dollar companies and exits from zero to a hundred million dollars over and over and over again. He was my validator, that, yes, this was the right system because there are very few people who are automatically exponential.

Chris: Yes.

Govindh: By “automatically exponential” I mean, we start at zero, go to hundreds of millions of dollars three years later and exit. There are very few people who sit in that category. He’s one of those people.

Chris: Wow. Right.

Govindh: He could only think that way so if he saw the pattern as being one that’s been in his life, that was a good one for me, right?

Chris: Yes.

Govindh: It was really important to have him alongside me on that journey and validate the things that I’d heard. In the book, the five steps are your secret weapon, understanding your mindset, the path, not just where you’re going, not just the goal but meaningfully understanding the twists, the turns along the way, the resilience factors that you need to have built in. Not your Plan A, B and C but your plan right to Z. Right?

Govindh: The fact that there’s no other way but just the path that you’re going. How do you build that path? Number three: the playbook. How are you going to measure progress along that path when things get dark? When the night hits you? When it’s the cold, dark winter and you’ve got no North Star, how are you going to measure progress along that path?

Govindh: Finally, how are you going to align the key players in your life around it? Now, if you’ve got a business, it’s a lifestyle business and you don’t necessarily have a team around you or you don’t want a team around you, that’s fine but, still, how do you assign the key players and align the key players in your life, in your business with that playbook and, ultimately, with the path?

[00:22:49]

Govindh: Then, finally, how do you feed action? Right? As a leader, feeding action, we talked about this off the top, feeding action is different than being action. Being action is just doing a bunch of stuff and we talked about how right now there are a bunch of thought leaders out there that are going around doing a bunch of stuff and saying, “Hey, look at me. I’m a thought leader. I can do this stuff,” but there are other people who are supporting the actions of others. Right? There are other people who are standing behind them and pushing this supportive structural leadership forward.

Govindh: Then, finally, the last step is results. I call that “life and business by design”, right? When you break down these five steps plus the bonus, which is “life and business by design”, it sits nicely into focus, align and act. There’s an internal and external component to each one. Focus: the internal component is my mindset. That’s my secret weapon. External component is where I’m going. The mission, vision values, a goal. My unrelenting commitment to where I’m going to be.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Govindh: Alignment—the internal component—is “How am I going to measure my progress? How do I know that I’m making progress? Because otherwise I’m going to shut it down.” Here’s what we do: Somebody along the way who wasn’t an entrepreneur said to a bunch of entrepreneurs that every goal has to be specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and time-bound … But here’s the idea, Chris. You’re going to go and do this thing that you’ve never done before in your life, it’s never been done, right? Because you’ve conceived it in your mind, this vision that you have that you can see that you want to bring to life, but it has to be time-bound.

Govindh: What do we do? We get partway down the path, we say, “There’s no way we’re going to make the time.” We feel like we’re a failure. We shut it down and we quit on ourselves before we quit on our dream because our dream never goes away. That’s the legacy. We were born to give birth to that. It never goes away and it eats at us. It can make us do bad things. It can make us be distracted. We could behave very badly. We could behave in destructive ways when that happens but the reality is, again, when we align ourselves with how we make progress along that path and then, align our key players with that—

Chris: Yes.

Govindh: –it becomes easier, right? We know how we’re making progress, we can feel that momentum at all times and, when we can feel that momentum, we can align other people with it and we know how … We can differentiate the people who are on our side and the ones who are off our side. Then, the external and internal parts of taking action is being a cheerleader, feeding your organization and people with heart, right?

[00:25:27]

Govindh: And being regular about it and understanding that there’s a predictability to it. Often what we say as entrepreneurs, “Ah, man, you know, I’m my boss. I’m going to do my own thing. I’m going to be wildly unpredictable,” and there’s certain leaders in the world right now that are behaving that way and it’s like, “Whoa. What’s going on?” But truly predictable success is … Predictability is the greatest leading indicator to predictable success, right? Having success is being predictable and being predictable to the people around you. You have to show up the same way to them all the time.

Govindh: How do you do that? That’s the internal component of action. The external component of action is an unrelenting commitment to results, an uncommon commitment to results. An uncommon commitment to results is the product of an uncommon focus, uncommon alignment and uncommon action.

Chris: That’s so badass, dude. I’m loving so much of what you’re saying. It’s incredible. The one thing I love about your focus, align and act is that you have the internal and the external. I think that the align section was really, really, really important.

[00:26:30]

Chris: One thing I’ve noticed about entrepreneurs that grow big is they have their own terms or word that they don’t need to tell anyone else about and they just have this number. In fact, I have the number that I tell my staff and then I have my number that I’m really going for and that’s really big, man.

Govindh: Chris, you have this other thing, too. You have this other thing. It’s like this barometric pressure indicated thing that you can feel if today’s going to be a day that you can move forward. Right?

Chris Duncan:      Yeah.

Govindh: You can feel in the morning, before you do anything else, you know, bam, “This is going to be a day. We’re going to jump forward.”

Chris: And nothing fails.

Govindh: It happens.

Chris: Yeah.

Govindh: That’s that calibration of that internal alignment. When you calibrate that tool, you can feel it and you can take advantage of it because not every day is like that. Right?

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Govindh: Then we can understand that smart, that t has no basis in our lives because we’re creating stuff that’s never existed before. We have to replace t and smart goals. Instead of time, it’s transparency of teams. Then you have transparency with a team of people to accomplish great things.

Chris: Transparency’s huge.

Govindh: We need to volunteer to be accountable with the things that we’re saying, right? It’s not being held accountable. That’s BS. We have to volunteer to be accountable and give trust so we can get trust. We have to give trust. We have to let people fail in our presence and be there to pick them back up so we can create problems that we can solve together.

Govindh: That’s what the modern leader needs to look like. I think that’s what the leaders have always looked like but now we just know.

[00:28:25]

Chris: Brother, this has been huge. Gosh. I don’t even know where to start on where to go next because I’m looking at everything that you’ve said here and there is so much density in this. HEre’s what I feel: I feel that we need to have another show. There’s only one other person and you know him that we’ve had another show with because, listeners, I feel like you right now. There is so much to consume that we nearly need to listen to this again. Gosh.

Chris: ‘ve got two questions that I love to ask. I ask everybody that comes to the show. I’m going to skip to that and then I think the next time that we talk, we need to go deep into some of this stuff. I’m going to have the show notes written up but here are my questions. This just comes out from such massive respect, the amount of … This is incredible. So, first, thank you so much. Really. This has made a difference to me today. The uncommon commitment? That just feels so good.

[00:29:17]

Chris: Anyway, let me ask my questions. Here’s the questions coming and you’re a freaking rock star, man. The first question is this: If today you lost it all, relationships, money, everything. You’re basically out on the street, you know nobody, you can’t contact anybody in your past, you just have what’s inside your head, how do you start your business and how do you go up to a million again?

Govindh: I’m going to ask you a clarifying question. I’m going to break the rules, right? Entrepreneur? I’m going to be a typical rule-breaker.

Chris: It happens most times.

Govindh: All right. Right. Caveat: Do I have my wife and my family?

Chris: Oh, yeah.

Govindh: Okay. You said everybody, right?

Chris: Yeah.

Govindh: If I had—

Chris: Business relationships.

Govindh: If I have Stacy and the kids, I’m not worried about a thing.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Govindh: Righty? They, all of them, are able to measure if I am … I’m going to use this terminology really carefully—if I am myself or not and if I am myself, if I am being Govindh at all times and I just happen to fail and by failing, I just get something wrong and fall down again, right? They’ll be there to pick me and I’m going to be okay because I won’t lose track of myself.

Govindh: As long as I am me, I have everything I need because then I can start again with focus. The first thing that I’ll do is truly and deeply … And I know this because, when we’re in the ditch, what we tend to do is focus on the terrain right around us, right? We’re just looking at that bumpy, crappy ground, the ditch, the sinkhole that we’re about to step into and we’re looking down. We end up looking down at this problem. We never take the time to look up and if we’re surrounded by people who we love, right? We can be the person that they see, right? Then, we get to look up.

Govind: As long as I have that, I have everything I need to restart and it’s the focus around that starts everything. It sounds like a soft skill but the first place that I start was training myself to look up.

Chris: Hmm. I like it.

[00:31:42]

Govindh: It’s not easy. And I know simple and easy are inversely correlated in every way except for their effectiveness, right? This is simple but not easy to do—

Chris: Wow.

Govindh: –because when you’re being beaten up, here’s what the world is telling you, the world will tell you, you got to fight—

Chris: Yeah.

Govindh: The world will tell you, you’ve got to dig. Dig deeper, right? I’m going to say that you’re going to surrender a little bit to where you are. And remind yourself who you are. Not where you are. Remind yourself of who you are.

Chris: Thank you. I love it. Here’s the second part of the question—

Govindh: I almost cried there so thanks for that.

[00:32:32]

Chris: Yeah, that was deep, brother. I appreciate it. Everything you’re saying is making an impact today. The second part of the question is this: If you could go back to the beginning of your entrepreneur journey and you had two minutes to share some advice, just advice, what advice would you share with the old version of you?

Govindh: What advice would I share? I think it would go to focus. I think that I let myself be unfocused. I lost track of who I was and got addicted to my … Temporary success and let that define me. Success was such an awful teacher to me and I let that success define me for too long and that made me dishonest. That made me destructive. That made me unkind and I truly believe that there are no failures, there are opportunities to grow and I’m grateful for them all today but the thing that I would ask my younger self to do is to focus.

[00:33:47]

Chris: Listeners this has been an amazing episode. I think that’s the best place to finish, brother. This is … yeah. This is really special. I’m going to leave you with the opportunity of how you’d like to finish off today’s episode. What’s in your heart that you’d like to share? But, if I was to try to recap my three pages of notes here … I’m going to try in a second but I’ll let you share a parting message with everyone that’s tuned in today.

Govindh: The thing that started me on this journey, Chris, and I’d like to end here, is … The thing that started me on this journey was an email and an email, it was like the original “Paper Napkin Wisdom” but it was email and it was the way someone signed off to it. It was the greatest most invisible leader, mentor, the person in the back, that I have ever met. You know? He’s phenomenally successful as an entrepreneur but, remarkably, against self-promotion. He ended the email to me when I was asking him for help, he said, “You have so much to give. You had better start now.”

Govindh: I dismissed the statement at first. I said, “Wow. What a great hook. I need that at the end of my emails.” I say “Best regards” or “Sincerely” when I really meant it. He said, “You have so much to give. You had better start now,” but he caught me in my lie because I hadn’t really started.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Govindh: I would say to people listening, “No matter how much you’re doing right now, remember, what more can you do? You have so much to give. Start now.”

[00:35:32]

Chris: This is an amazing episode from your book to leadership is opening the door, to the invisible leadership, to legacy is the thing that will last without you to talking about mentors, your story, your quote from Kevin O’Leary. This has been really special. Listen, I hope that you really listen to this again. Brother, this has been really cool and thank you for your time. I know time is our most valuable asset that we have to give and thank you for giving so much today.

Chris: We look forward to sending this out to as many listeners and, listeners, if you go to my website christophermduncan.com/podcast, you’ll be able to fully track down Govindh. We will also have links to his book and all other things so you can stalk around the internet if that’s your wish. I just want to say this to everybody: live with total freedom. Free your mind, free your time, free your life and do what matters most and do it right now.

Chris: Thanks, brother. Everyone out there, like and subscribe and share this episode and I’ll see you very soon.

Govindh: You got it.

Duncan: My name is Christopher Duncan, your host. I interview top experts and guests who have achieved total freedom and share with you the strategies that I have used to not just create one, but help over 200 people start a six figure freedom business, where they can travel, enjoy their life and make the money they truly deserve. Enjoy the show!

Freedom FastTrackers, I’m here with John Jonas, and he created onlinejobs.ph, and I was just saying online before we started how much this man has changed my life and he didn’t even know it. In fact, all of my staff that I currently have, have been employed through this site. We have 48 staff and John, I was telling you this before, that these are some of my favorite people on the planet. We’ve even had them on this podcast, because we wanted people to understand what it’s like to have virtual assistants.

So, at first, I just want to say, listeners, this is kind of cool for me, because I didn’t know who created the website. It was never really shared anywhere, and when I had been told you were going to be on with us, on this show, I was so excited and then we just kept on missing … this is like a fifth attempt, trying to get on. Welcome to the show brother.

John Jonas: Hey, thanks for having me, it’s good.

Duncan: And, you’re in Utah right now, right?

John Jonas: I am in Utah! I love it here.

Duncan: Tell us your story and go into detail, fill us in because, I want to know how you got started and how you ended up creating what it is that you did. I’m just – this is a personal question. I just really want to know what —

John Jonas: Totally. So stuff … so it turned into like, time freedom. This started back when I was like, five years old, I remember … that’s when I remember thinking I wanted to be a lawyer, which is totally ironic because that’s the opposite of time freedom. But my dad always had a job and we were always poor, and my uncle was rich and he was a lawyer and I wanted to be a lawyer. So, I went into college for … I went pre-law and it wasn’t till I was part way through school that I was like, “I can’t do this! I hate this!”

Duncan: Right.

John Jonas:         And so I got a job out of school for … I had a job for 10 months and my only goal during that time was to quit my job because I just don’t like it. I don’t like working for someone else. I’m a terrible employee and it sucked. But it took me 10 months before I made something online work and I had a little bit of income and it was enough that I was like, “I gotta go for this. I’ve gotta try it and see.” And so I quit my job within 10 months.

It was a leap. We didn’t have any debt, which is a really big deal for getting to the point where you want to be free … is keeping out of debt. We had very little expenses. I was married. I had two kids. And then I just started doing this online stuff and stuff was working and I realized what I was doing at the time wasn’t going to keep working, and so I evolved. I started learning more stuff. This was in 2004 when I did that, so that’s 13 years, yeah.

Duncan: Wow. And so that’s where you got started and then when did you come up with the idea of what you’re doing now? How did that kind of show up? I mean, I’m assuming that you were a client of yourself first? Or how did —

John Jonas: I’m still a client of myself, man! I was talking to the owner of backcountry.com one day and he … backcountry.com is the largest online retailer of outdoor gear. They’re huge. And the owner told me, “When you’re ready to start outsourcing some of the stuff that you’re doing, make sure you go the Philippines with it.” And I was like, “Huh. That’s weird.” And he said, “Yeah because, in India, when you turn up with something and they say yes that means ‘yes, I heard something come out of your mouth’. It does not mean ‘yes, I understood what you said’.

And that was a really big change for me because I had tried hiring people in India before. I had tried what Tim Ferriss says in ‘The Four Hour Work Week’ and it didn’t work for me and I didn’t like it. And I had tried hiring local people and it didn’t work for me. And I had tried hiring contract workers off of … it was E-Lance at the time [inaudible 00:04:36] and it didn’t work for me. There was one huge difference in between what he gave me, which he told me to go hire someone on full time and he gave me a reference where I could hire someone and the huge difference was hire someone full time, not a temporary contract worker. Like the definition of a contract worker or a freelancer is 100 percent turnover in your business.

And that’s hard and it didn’t work for me because I wanted to automate systems so I could step out and I wanted to be able to walk away from the processes and I couldn’t do that with the way Tim Ferriss talked about it. I couldn’t do it with E-Lance [inaudible 00:05:18]. I couldn’t do it with local workers because the first thing they did when I taught them it, they’d quit and went and did it on their own. So, the Philippines was a really, really magical thing for me.

Duncan: Yes.

John Jonas:         In what it allowed me to do.

1. Duncan: And I think that’s huge because we had the exact same problem and that’s why I was attracted to your site. I’ve used it extensively and told many people to go there because it is a struggle. You know, you do want freedom and so typically an entrepreneur solves the first problem, which is how do I make money? And they solve that problem and then the next problem is like, well how do I actually get my life back? Right?

John Jonas:         Yeah, totally. Totally.

1. Duncan: I mean, people sometimes say to me, “Oh, but that’s a good problem to have!” I would argue that it’s just another problem, right? So, that’s what you solved. So, go on and share —

John Jonas:         But it’s totally solvable! Right?

1. Duncan: Yes. Yes, it is.

John Jonas:         Totally solvable.

1. Duncan: So, let’s go into that. How do we solve that problem? How do we get started on hiring and who should we hire and what’s important to start?

John Jonas:         Okay, so here’s what I did the very first time. I got this reference from this dude who told me where to hire someone and I went back and forth for a couple of months saying, “I don’t know if I can afford to hire someone.” It was 750 dollars a month to hire someone because, at the time, it was hard to find people. It was just a crappy process. You had to go through a service. They marked them up three times. So, I was paying them 750 dollars a month, they were paying them 250, but that was all there was. I went back and forth and I debated, “Could they do as good of work as I could do?” Whatever.

I ended up hiring someone and it was an amazing, liberating experience because I had been the one doing all of the work in my business. And all of a sudden, I had this other dude who’s full time job was to do whatever I asked him to do. I could teach him anything I wanted him to do. I just had to create the teaching/training, which I could do, and then he could take full processes away from me because his only job was to do whatever it was I told him to do. 40 hours a week.

And so that meant, after a couple of months, there were two of me because he was doing what I had previously been doing and now I was able to do other stuff and he was doing it how I wanted it done. The other thing that I didn’t realize this would cause for me was, because it was his job to work for me full time, it was my job to keep him busy full time, which meant I had to come up with stuff for him to do.

All of the times where I would learn something new about marketing or websites or whatever it is, when you’re doing it on your own you have to skip those things because there’s not time in the day to do it, and now there was time in the day to do it. I just wasn’t the one who was gonna do it. That really made a shift for me in what was possible and what I could pay attention to and what I could learn because I knew I can learn this and then teach it to someone else and I’m not going to be the one doing the work.

The very first guy that I hired knew nothing, which was really … he later told me, “Man, when you hired me I was so scared because I didn’t know anything and I didn’t know what it was going to be like and then you started teaching me.” It changed his life, but he knew nothing and his English sucked. I just … what I did with him was I just accommodated to what he know, so I would teach him. I taught him how to build a WordPress site. I taught him how to change the theme. I taught him how to make the site look like I wanted it to look. He’s not a designer, but WordPress has themes and it’s pretty easy. I taught him how to do SEO and how to accommodate the SEO to his English level at the time, which today his English is flawless. He’s learned so well. He still works for me. I hired him in 2006, so it’s been 11 years.

1. Duncan: Wow.

John Jonas:         I started teaching him all this stuff and the more I taught him, the more free I was because I was able to go and do other stuff. I also realized pretty quickly, not only do I have enough work to keep this guy busy full time, but I want someone else and so I hired a programmer soon after that. Because I graduated from college in computer science, I was doing programming and I was a reasonably good programmer. I didn’t know if someone else could do as good of a job as me and, in the end, what happened was I realized programming doesn’t make money. Programming … it just builds a product and you can build a really cool product, but if you don’t sell it, it doesn’t matter. And so, I haven’t written code in six or seven years now. Not at all. Even though I like it and I want to, I realized this is not effective. It’s not an effective way to run a business. Now I have lots of programmers that work for me.

That’s kind of my … where I got started and I think a lot of people would do really well to start their first person by hiring someone who speaks really good English and teach them whatever it is you want them to do. I say that because the Philippines has some cultural issues that are different then anywhere else in the world. In India, you have communication problems with people. You’ll never have that in the Philippines. You don’t have communication … they always understand what you say, you understand what they say, that’s not the issue.

The issue with the Philippines is trust. Whenever you and I say trust or any employer says, “I don’t know if I can trust them,” which is the exact opposite of the actual problem. You can trust them in the Philippines for the most part. And not everybody there is trustworthy, obviously, but the real issues with the Philippines is they don’t trust you. Until they trust you, they will not become a rockstar employee for you. That took me a long time to learn, but as soon as they trust you that you’re not gonna yell at them, that you’re not gonna berate them, that you’re not gonna fire them when they do something wrong, that you’re gonna reinforce the good things that they do, and give them feedback and training. As soon as they trust you, they’ll go above and beyond what you ask them to do to do really amazing things because they really, really want to keep their job. Their life depends on it. Their life depends on the job that you gave them.

Does that make sense?

1. Duncan: Oh brother, it makes so much sense and our staff are some of our most favorite people. We go visit them in the Philippines … because they’re all over there. We’ve gone and visited them every quarter we were visiting them. So, I would fly into Manila, go down to [inaudible 00:12:04], Cebu, and then back up to Manila and we took em out on staff parties. I think the biggest thing for us, John, has been when you treat them like they’re family and that they are staff … and we always say, “We’re here to grow you and you can make mistakes.” And you do that, it makes the biggest difference.

John Jonas:         It’s so huge! That is so big. And that right there is a huge deal as people start doing this. If you treat them as family, basically. When something goes wrong, don’t say, “Oh you’re fired! Oh, you didn’t show up to work for two days — you’re fired!” Which so many people have that tendency.

1. Duncan: I think it’s a difference between leadership styles and its transformation in leadership, but I want to come back to that. Before that I want to ask a question, which I think’s really important. You said that programming doesn’t make a lot of money and here’s what I want to talk about on that is I actually think the more people know how to do themselves, the less money they’ll make. In fact, the most important skill as you have explained, actually being able to teach others to do what you do and I’d love for you to elaborate on just where you’re lifestyle is at now because you’ve had the ability to do that. Just cuz I really want people to understand that it’s that possible.

John Jonas:         This morning I got up and made my kids’ lunches for school and I got them all off to school and I studied my scriptures and said my prayers this morning, so that was all up until nine o’clock. At nine o’clock, my wife left to go swimming … to go to a swim class that we both usually go to, but we have sick kid so I stayed home, gave one of my daughters a reading lesson, watched television with them, and then I worked for about an hour. When my wife came home from swim, we went out skiing. We go up into the mountains, cross-country skiing for a couple of hours. It’s two o’clock as record this and I got back at like 1:15 and ate lunch and I’m recording this and we’ll be done, I don’t know, three o’clock? My kids will be home at three and 3:45 and I’m basically done for the day.

So, what did I do in that one hour that I worked? And usually it’s like two to three hours a day that I work. And it wasn’t always like this, but this is where you can get to as you learn to hire people correctly. I get emails from people … all of my people have to send me an email every single day or they have to send me an update on our project management system. That’s what I want everyday from them. I look at what they did. Very often it requires nothing from me because they’re doing their tasks and they’re good at it. But some stuff requires me to give feedback. So, what did I do today? I tweaked a test on the homepage of onlinejobs.ph that we’re working on and then I realized, as I looked at some of the data, our ‘How it Works’ page sucks and it’s gotta change. So, I went through our ‘How it Works’ page and gave instructions to someone saying, “Modify this, change that, modify this, add this, add that.” And then I went skiing with my wife.

John Jonas:         So, that’s what I do. I have designers. I have webmasters. I have programmers. I have content writers. I have customer service people. I have social media people. I have an HR person. I have an artist who works for me. I give them stuff to do in the business. I see … I think, is basically what it comes down to. I think. And when I think through something, I come up with what I want, I give it to them and say, “Hey, go do this.” It almost never gets done exactly right the first time. I almost always have to say, “K, no let’s do this and this and this to it.” But that’s all I do. I don’t ever touch the website. I don’t log in to WordPress. I don’t modify things. I think and I tell them what to do or how to do it.

1. Duncan: You’re such a badass and I love the shift … I always say to the people is when you make the shift from doer to delegator to decision maker, that’s where it comes to and being that decision maker is where you just get to be at the top. You say, “Here’s the decision. This is where we’re gonna be going …” and it’s beautiful. And it’s good to talk to another one that’s —

John Jonas:         And that. That, man … it’s so cool to talk someone else who’s so similar. That right there, the decision maker, I think is what sets successful entrepreneurs apart from failed entrepreneurs. Where —

1. Duncan: It does. It does.

John Jonas:         Most people aren’t willing to make the decision and to think through a process and say, “No, this is what we’re going to do and here’s why.” Most people just say, “Oh, he said to do this and I’m doing it and … It didn’t work.”

1. Duncan: Yeah. Yeah and a lot of times it won’t work, but you have to be the one that made the decision and own it and change it. I always tell people, John, that their business is a series of micro-tests and you’re just testing what works, what doesn’t until you get it right.

John Jonas:         Yes! This is one of those tests. Hiring the people in the Philippines, that was my test. I hired them to see, does this work? And yes, it works for me and it works for you. It doesn’t for everybody, but what you said, people … different personalities have different management styles and some people just can’t handle it. They can’t handle that they have to treat someone nice. (laughing) Seriously, I hired this dude the other day … no, I know this dude who hired someone the other day and I know the guy he hired is really good because I know who he has worked for in the past and I know what they say. And this dude said, “I gave him a test and didn’t work.” I was like, “Well, you gave him one hour test and that’s it? I told you this dude is talented.” “Ah, I can’t do it. I can’t do it.” All right, it’s not for you. But man, this’ll change your life.

1. Duncan: Oh yeah. I think when it comes to delegating and actually working on it, there’s a few different schools of thought. And so my question is, you have to hire someone, as you said, and then teach them. But out of everywhere in your business, how do you choose where to start?

John Jonas:         Ah, it’s not a fair question for me because I’m 11 years in.

1. Duncan: Let me ask it in a better way then. Some people say, “You should start with the things that you already know.” So they say, “Teach what you know.” And then others will say, “You should hire stuff that you don’t know and get them to do that.” What’s your opinion?

John Jonas:         My opinion is … so this depends on your end goal. Is your end goal to make more money and keep working as much as you work? Or is your end goal to free up your time and make more money?

For me, it’s to free up my time and make more money. So, I hire people to do, in the beginning, things that I already know how to do because I know what we’re doing is effective and I know that my way to do it is effective. So, if I’m gonna hire someone, I’m gonna teach em how to do it my way. Because you never know, when you hire someone, who knows if they really know how to do what they say. Even in the US, you see it all the time. Like, you suck at your job, but I talk a really good game, right? I prefer to free up my time by getting someone to do what I already know how to do and then move on to something else.

1. Duncan: That’s awesome and the reason why I like that is because, even if that person leaves, you’ve created a training system. You own the system, so you can train the next person then.

John Jonas:         Yes! And in the Philippines, if you treat this person well and you train them well, they’ll never quit working for you or, I mean I can tell you that in 11 years I’ve probably hired 28 people and I have 21 working for me today.

1. Duncan: Wow.

John Jonas:         And some of that’s my personality, but if you treat them well they don’t want to leave. You may have to let em go if things don’t work out, but they don’t want to leave.

1. Duncan: It’s true and I have experienced that. Anyone listening, I would highly recommend getting out and meeting your staff and creating that because it makes all the difference when you see them in person and you get to give them a hug and say, “Thank you.” That’s super critical. [crosstalk 00:21:26]

John Jonas:         [crosstalk 00:21:27] in your proximity to the Philippines?

1. Duncan: So I’m in Austin, Texas right now. (laughs)

John Jonas:         You are? Oh really? Oh dude!

1. Duncan: I mean I feel the proximity! (laughs)

John Jonas:         I went in 2010 … I’ve only done it once, which is surprising to a lot of people. I’ve only been there once. I hired my first person in 2006. I went in 2010 and met the eight people that I had working for me at the time, but I took my family and we spent five weeks on a beach in the Philippines with my wife and three kids. It took us 36 hours door to door from our house to where we were staying and that’s hard. It’s painful. But unbelievably worth it.

1. Duncan: Yes. Totally worth it. Totally rewarding and yeah very, very cool. I’ve got two questions I ask everybody that comes on this show and what they do is they help to … the person that’s going to start out or get moving understand where you are and how you would do it after all your experience. So here’s the first question. It’s super easy to answer. The first question is if you lost everything today, all your money, all your relationships, all your contacts, you had nothing – how would you go about starting a business?

John Jonas:         Dang, dude. What I would probably do is I would find someone who is really good at something … I’ll tell you what I recently did and I would do it again. I would someone who is an expert at something. I have a good friend who is an expert at Ironman. He did 50 Ironman in 50 days, one in each state in the US last year.

1. Duncan: Wow.

John Jonas:         Yeah, crazy, crazy, crazy. And I took him and his knowledge and created a training program for people wanting to do Ironman.

1. Duncan: Got it.

John Jonas:         And I have someone else do the copywriting for it and I have someone else build the website and I have someone else do the design work and I took his knowledge and his content and stuck it in and created a membership site with it. And I hired someone else to run the Facebook advertising, Google AdWords advertising. He’s doing his promotions with the people that he knows and I’ve hired people to do the promotions and so we built this whole business just based around this expert because he had the knowledge.

1. Duncan: I love it.

John Jonas:         So, if I had to start again, that’s what I would do. I would do that over and over again.

1. Duncan: It’s the exact answer I gave and, it’s interesting, you’re the first person to give me the same answer. Because I got asked it in Singapore and I said, “Here’s what I would do if I had no money. I’d find the person with the idea, find the person with the marketing, find the salesperson, find the customer support, find the tech person, I’d give them all 10 percent and I’d take 50 and just write the contract and make it work.

John Jonas:         And even better than that … to find the person with their knowledge and give them their 10 percent or 20 percent or whatever it is and the hire people in the Philippines to do the rest of it and don’t give anymore.

1. Duncan: (laughs)

John Jonas:         [crosstalk 00:24:43] built the website and the designer are in the Philippines and the Facebook advertiser is in the Philippines and there’s me and the other dude.

1. Duncan: (laughs) I love it, except there was one part of the question that said you had no money. (laughing) [crosstalk 00:24:59]

John Jonas:         All right, all right. I got it.

1. Duncan: So, John assumed that he could go down to the bank and get a quick credit card because he can hire pretty cheap and made it happen.

John Jonas:         That’s right. That’s right, dude.

1. Duncan: I love it!

John Jonas:         You can borrow 1000 dollars because hiring people in the Philippines is so much cheaper than anywhere else.

1. Duncan: There you go, so if that part [inaudible 00:25:18] there’s the steps. I love it, brother.

And here’s the second part to the question. It goes like this: If you go back to the start of your journey, maybe it was 2003 or 2002, right when you were about to start out and you got to fly back in time right now with all the experience that you have now and you could go back and you’ve got a minute to give advice to that version of you, what advice would you give to yourself starting out?

John Jonas:         Oh dang. I would … I don’t know, dude! Learn to sell information. Learn to sell information.

1. Duncan: That’s perfect.

John Jonas:         It’s so good.

1. Duncan: Brother, I feel like we literally are the same person sometimes. (laughing) We’ve only been talking for 33 minutes .. it’s 3:33 where I am right now, isn’t that interesting? And I’ve just liked everything you’re saying. I’m so connected to you, man. It’s really interesting.

This was a fast episode, but I felt like we covered a lot and here’s my big message from just this episode. I’m gonna ask … we’re gonna get more from John, but it’s clear to go to onlinejobs.ph. I use it. He uses it. He built it and I recommend it, but here’s what I love is we’re talking to someone who’s got the freedom. Did you hear his day? Do you know it’s a Tuesday and that was his day? He went skiing and doing those things. This is the most important thing is right now is the youngest any of us are gonna be and the opportunity we have, not only to build freedom for ourselves, but also to free someone on the other side of the world and give them a great job, is tremendous.

John, I’d like to just leave it with you. How would you like to end today? What message would you like to leave with the audience?

John Jonas:         So, what you said about business is a bunch of micro-tests, that’s what I want is to say you have to go give this a try to see if it’s gonna work for you. I know that a lot of people out there think, “Oh, I can’t afford to hire someone. Oh, I don’t have enough stuff to keep em busy full time.” Go try it. I cannot tell you how many times people have said, “Oh my gosh, I had no idea how much I have to do until I hired someone in the Philippines to start doing it for me.” Give it a shot and see if it works the way that we both have said it works and that thousands of other people have said it works. Because if it does, if ti works, it changes everything.

1. Duncan: It really does.

John Jonas:         [crosstalk 00:27:51] payroll for 21 people is like 11 or 12 or 13 thousand dollars a month.

1. Duncan: And you’re paying them well?

John Jonas:         And we’re paying them well.

1. Duncan: You’re paying them really well. That’s awesome, brother. This is incredible to connect. I look forward to connecting as well a little bit of this session, but listeners, I hope this was enough to push you over the edge to go and get an assistant. Either use the site, you should use [inaudible 00:28:16]. It’s badass. It just works. The Filipinos are the best people and to all my staff that are editing this right now, we love you!

John Jonas:         We do! We love you!

1. Duncan: We love you! And this is the guy that put you connected with us and now you’ve got an amazing job because … they will be editing this and then they’ll be making snippets, then putting it on my website and they’ll all be listening to it and I know they’re all going to be laughing their heads off right now as I’m saying this. (laughing)

John Jonas:         Dude, I love it.

Duncan: Listeners, live with total freedom. Free your mind, free your time, and free your whole life, so you can do more of what matters most. This was a super important episode. John, I appreciate your time. I know how it’s very valuable, so thank you for spending some time with us today. And listeners, if you wanted to connect with John check out christophermduncan/podcasts. You have all the show notes there and how to connect on his Facebook, and any other way you can stalk him across the Internet that he’s gonna allow us, will all be there. And I’ll catch you at our next episode.

Taryn, I’m so excited to have you on the show. Listeners, Taryn Southern is a musical comedian, actress, video blogger, creator and starter of Taryn TV, which it says here at 400,000 subscribers, but I swear you’re about to hit half a million subscribers. I have to say I haven’t come across you until just recently but I’m super impressed Taryn, by what you’re doing. I watched your stuff on virtual reality. You seem like somebody who has done so many amazing things and I just had to go, “Wow! I need to know this lady,” as I’m clicking through your videos, looking at what you’re doing and looked at your Wikipedia page and so, I’m really inspired to have you here so thanks for spending some time.

Taryn Southern:                 Oh, thank you. That’s so kind of you. I’m happy to be here.

Christopher:                         That’s awesome because for me, being someone else who also wants to get out there and share a message and change lives and do big things, sometimes it’s great just to see other people doing it, but the thing I always know is no one lands on top of a mountain or even really thinks they’re at the top of a mountain. So, I’d love for you to fill us in in your story and where you started. Give us a bit of a journey because I’m sure there’s some fun things in there.

Taryn Southern:                 Sad part is the journey just gets longer and longer every year that goes by. I used to have a very concise journey. Now, it feels like a little longer so I’ll try to keep it elegant. I think brevity is the key to elegance. I tend to be long-winded though so we’ll see. I grew up in Wichita, Kansas. I always knew from … I think from seven years old that I wanted to travel the world and see what else was out there. I had this big map above my bed and I would mark down all of the places I wanted to go and see. I just had any quest for adventure and discovery. That followed me through high school. I spend several summers out in Los Angeles; drove out with my dad. I was like, “Dad, let’s just go to LA. I want to figure out what the entertainment industry’s like.”

I had done a lot of plays and musicals growing up as a little kid so I was certainly interested in entertainment. Auditioned for American Idol when I was 17 years old. That was early on in American Idol history. Made it into the finals but had never performed in front of an audience before outside of my high school theater. Certainly [inaudible 00:02:46] national television and my nerves just couldn’t take it. Right before my first semester of college, I forgot all of my lyrics in the final round that I was on American Idol on national television.

Christopher:                         Ouch.

Taryn Southern:                 Pretty soul crushing. With my tail between my legs, I went back to school, which was University of Miami in Florida. The furthest place from Wichita, Kansas that you can get, both culturally and geographically, and decided to study anthropology because I thought I’m not destined to do entertainment, it’s just not for me, I’m not good enough, I can’t crack it. Studied anthropology and that was fascinating. I studied [psycho-chronocology 00:03:26] specifically. Hallucinogenic drugs was my senior thesis.

Christopher:                         No shit.

Taryn Southern:                 Yeah, so went from this very specific way of thinking in how I was raised in the kind of community I grew up in to something that was polar opposite. I did fieldwork in Peru and Belize. My whole world was just cracked open. It was like, “Oh my God. I just can’t believe that all this exists out there.”

Christopher:                         Wow.

Taryn Southern:                 When I graduated, I just felt this immense pressure from possibility, which was probably an amazing thing but also really scary because I realized that all the plans I had had for myself to pursue a traditional career, work my way up the ladder, be successful in terms whatever my parents had sort of set forth were all probably not right. That was the beginning of this crazy journey of me moving to LA and doing what I’m doing now, which has been a plethora of different things over the last 10 years. We can get into whatever you think is most interesting for your audience but that’s the background on me and making that switch into … Like, let’s do something awesome. If we’re going to do something, let’s just freaking do it.

Christopher:                         Do you know what I thinks the most interesting is, you’ve already said it, is the pressure of possibility and that should really be a book because for us and you and I are very similar age and it’s like we just grew up in this age where everything was possible. We could go anywhere on the planet. We can talk to people anywhere we want and it’s kind of, “Well, what the heck do I chose and how do I know?” I would love to talk to that person who’s sitting out there and they just … I guess I call the luxurious position. It’s so luxurious. You have all of these things but, which one do I choose? For you, how did you choose?

Taryn Southern:                 That is such a great question and I think, to be honest, why it’s such a great question is it never ceases to lose its relevance in that every single year I sit back and I feel overwhelmed by some extent by my own curiosities. I get taken in so many different directions because I can’t stop myself and so I’m always trying to figure out how to create boundaries and limitations because I think that, for the most part, that’s been a key factor in me being able to actually succeed, to some extent, at what I’m doing but also it has also yielded happiness in many areas. For me, the pressure of possibility, as you put it, it’s very real, all the time and I think in the first [inaudible 00:06:17] of it, I’m not kidding you, in college I had eight jobs. I worked as, over the course of two and a half years, I worked at a PR firm, I worked at Morgan Stanley, I worked in the investigative unit of NBC in Miami, I worked as an undercover alcohol marketer, wasn’t legal to drink, nanny, I worked as a casting director for HGTV, like the most random things because I just was so interested in so many things and I didn’t know what direction life would take me.

I ended up choosing to go to LA, choosing to pursue entertainment because it just felt like the craziest thing I could do. It felt like the most unstable thing I could do and one thing I recognized at that age was that my risk tolerance was sure to go down as I got older. The ability to pick up my bags and go to a city where I knew essentially no one and pursue a career that was completely unstable, had no handbook for success, and relied on talent and connections and I think hard work but you’re not even sure, [inaudible 00:07:27] how you actually succeed in it and it just felt like there’s no other time for me that felt good other than now. So, that’s why I ended up choosing entertainment but quite honestly, I was interested in doing just about anything.

Christopher:                         And that’s beautiful. It really is and I really love to hear from people who were able to take action because a lot of people don’t have those ideas or have those dreams, they let them go, and I always say this to people is if the fear of regret is higher than your fear of failure, then you take action because you never know what shows up when you just get in action. There’s something else I want to bring to the conversation and that’s this is when we’re young and we’re in our 20s and our early 30s, we have the smallest amount of responsibility that we’ll ever have. It only gets harder as you get older to actually then go and do things, you know. As you get kids and family, a house, and other things, as you get older, there’s more responsibility to go take those chances and so I always suggest is as early as possible we need to try as many things. It sounds like you subscribe to a similar thing to that as well.

Taryn Southern:                 I was an anthropology major. That’s what we do is we just look [crosstalk 00:08:43] and we dissect and we dissect and we dissect and then we move on to the next thing. Yeah. It’s fun.

Christopher:                         You brushed across some of your success very modestly but I’ve love you to share maybe some of your top three or five things that you’re the most proud of that you’ve been able to achieve on your time on this planet.

Taryn Southern:                 I’m so bad at … I’m really not good at talking about myself. I feel guilty. I’m like, “Why would anybody want to hear about what I’ve done?”

Christopher:                         And so listeners, if you’re listening to this on audio, I’ve just made Taryn completely uncomfortable, she’s got her hands on her face like, “What am I going to say?” And here’s why I asked the question is because I know there’s people out there listening that just want to be inspired by where you’ve got to. For me, that’s a question, you know, it’s more about us being able to share with them as short as possible.

Taryn Southern:                 Okay, sure. All right, I’m going to do my best and I just apologize if any of this comes off as self [inaudible 00:09:45] or I don’t know, I just-

Christopher:                         I don’t think that’s going to happen for you. In fact, it’s not.

Taryn Southern:                 Okay, I appreciate that. I’ve been really fortunate to … I think part of the reason that I’ve been able to do a lot in the 10 years that I’ve been in LA is because I’m just a naturally curious person. Every aspect of storytelling and entertainment has been of interest to me and so I’ve had a number of different opportunities across various fields so I’d say if I were to take like the three to five. As a television host, I think I was the youngest person ever host the Golden Globe’s red carpet for NBC at 22.

Christopher:                         Wow.

Taryn Southern:                 That was very exciting. That was early on in my hosting career. Being in that position very early on was exciting for me and a big challenge. I sold a television show that was a travel show to DirecTV. I was an executive producer and host of that, also very early in my career, which taught me a lot about creating your own opportunities in a business where most people wait for the phone to ring. From that point on, proceeded to create a lot of the opportunities for myself. I’ve written and produced or sold four pilots to TV networks and on the digital side have produced over 1,000 videos. It was obviously my YouTube channel, which houses, I think, about 300 of them, and then brands like The Today Show, [inaudible 00:11:22], movietickets.com, Glamor, various brands that I’ve produced long form or short form content series for. When I say produce, I mean wrote or created, conceptualized, and then oftentimes provided on-camera services, whether that’s acting or hosting for.

I … Trying to think … I guess as an actress, I really … I’ve been lucky enough to work with some of my favorite comedians doing comedy shows like New Girl, Rules of Engagement … I know you’re from Australia, right? So, I don’t know …

Christopher:                         I’m from New Zealand. I’m from New Zealand.

Taryn Southern:                 New Zealand. I’m sorry. That must be so offensive to hear. Moving along. I don’t know how many of these shows you are familiar with but they involved a lot of actors that I looked up to as a child so it was really fun to be working with people like … I mean, I’ll never actually forget the moment where I booked a job where I had to kiss Johnathan Taylor Thomas, who was famous from being in Home Improvement as a kid.

Christopher:                         Home Improvement. Right.

Taryn Southern:                 And I remember thinking like, “You know what? At this point? I’m done. Like I’m good for the rest of my life.” My 10 year old self is freaking out so that was big. I’d say, I produced an album, a musical comedy album, I think four years ago and one of the songs ended up on the top 100 on the radio, which was very exciting and random and unexpected. I’ve done a lot of music stuff as a result of that. That was just an inadvertent hobby of mine and I’ve been able to actually make money and perform. It’s certainly not my focus but an awesome happy accident. I would say those are four areas that I feel proud of and then I’m currently working on a documentary, which I can’t really talk about but I’m sure will … That will be the fifth part of what I feel most proud of, when I finish it.

Christopher:                         That’s awesome there and good for you and it is really great to hear those stories because I was reading on your Wikipedia and looking up on your bio and I was like, “Wow!” You know, this really inspires me to play a bigger game and do big things. You’re an inspiration and I really appreciate having you on. I’d love to really dive in and talk to the person out there who’s scared to take that jump and to take that leap because to me, when I hear your story and what it is that you’ve done, you know, just going into the acting … Well first, I’ve just to leave the hometown and then go somewhere else and then go do the acting and the musicals and then to do not to just music but also comedy at the same time, which are the scariest things on the planet. No one succeeds in Hollywood. You do. You know, there’s so many things that you’ve been able to make happen. What are you going to say to the person that sitting there that knows that they should to be playing a video game but they’re not?

Taryn Southern:                 It is scary. It’s really scary. I don’t … Wow, I have so many different thoughts on this topic. Some maybe more rooted in the foundation of practicality than others. I think doing anything that doesn’t have a handbook or a 401K plan is terrifying. Oftentimes, what I find is it’s easier to sit in the terror of the unknown than to actually lean into the terror of failure, of feeling failure. In the industry, like the one I’m in, you feel failure all the time. I mean, from my four years here was mainly stint working in traditional media. So, that meant dozens upon dozens upon dozens of terrible auditions, where I’d go home and cry, or I’d say, “That was so embarrassing,” or I’d worked so hard on this, on this audition for three days, and now it’s done because my nerves failed me or I did something embarrassing and I would just beat myself up, so you felt that kind of failure.

And then moving into a space like with digital media where you’re putting out a video, sometimes two, three times a week, oftentimes, not at the level that you would’ve hoped for or you get … I’ve certainly had videos fail massively in terms of the response and the kind of comments that you read. It’s just … You have to have really tough skin and so I think a lot of people … What they’re really scared of? They’re really scared of public failure. They’re scared of like … It could go as small as … They’re scared of … I always encourage people to talk about every fear that they have associated with starting a project because sometimes you just think it’s, “Oh, it’s so overwhelming. Like all the things that could possibly go wrong.” So then talk about it. Put it down on paper. If you’re afraid about starting your brand because … You might just discover that you have this fear of starting a Facebook page because you don’t like the idea of it having seven likes on it for the first six weeks, right? That’s a real fear. And no one should diminish that fear. That would make anyone feel sad, right?

But let’s acknowledge those fears and say, “Okay, let’s just assume that that’s part of the package,” and like experience those and feel through that so that when it’s time to actually take action, which is usually now, [inaudible 00:16:45] in and we don’t create unhealthy expectations. As it is, there is a journey and failure is required. You don’t have companies like Google become Google or Amazon become Amazon without failing [inaudible 00:17:00] of times.

Christopher:                         So true … Stop and listen to this. I really hope you’re enjoying the show. This is Christopher Duncan here. And I just want to let you know that some of you out there need to get started in building your wealth online. Have more freedom, more time off. We’ve got a few dramatic gifts online webinars, trainings, and other actionable things that you can go and learn from so you can get started. Whether you want to have more time off by using outsource [inaudible 00:17:25], whether you need a system to start or grow your business, if you need more [inaudible 00:17:30], if you need to make more money. Just by listening to this show, we want to invite you to go be able to go and get some free trainings from me and other experts. Go over to the link www.christophermduncan.com/gifts, and you will receive everything that you need to have total freedom. Now, let’s get back to the show. Write that down, www.christophermduncan.com/gifts, and let’s get back to the show. I hope you enjoy it …

So, you always tell everybody that business is nothing but a series of micro tests and you’re just testing and most of the time when you’re testing, you’re getting it wrong. I love that you talked about fear because it can stop us and I think it’s always there and I really like talking about it and getting it out there. Listeners, I really want you to take this on because I see a lot of people … I see a lot of you and you send me in emails and I hear from you and I know you want to take that action and I just want you to really hear this from somebody who I’m talking to today who has just taken so much amazing action and done so many cool things. I want to talk about some stuff that I’ve seen on your VR because I really want to talk … Do you want to talk about virtual reality today because I definitely do.

Taryn Southern:                 Yeah, for sure. We can talk about whatever you want to talk about.

Christopher:                         I love you. You’re the best person-

Taryn Southern:                 I’m an open book.

Christopher:                         Here’s something that I think that stumps people a lot is pressure from people they love. Number one, expectations from parents and then comparing themselves to others. Has this been something that you had to deal with and how did you handle that?

Taryn Southern:                 For sure. There is no version of a career in entertainment where you’re not comparing yourself to others. I’ve now, since I’ve been here for 10 years, I’ve had friends become massively famous and incredibly successful and just get the right project at the right time and it just … It catapults them and then you see other people who have these incredible successes and then all of a sudden, for whatever reason, it’s taken away from them and they just can’t get back on the horse. And then I’ve had friends that just can’t figure it out. They’ve just been trying and trying and trying and maybe they’re really talented, maybe they’re really smart, maybe they’re neither of those things, and they just can never quite find their place. It scams the gamut of all of those things and comparing yourself to anyone, it’s the most futile exercise.

So, something I always tell people to do when they are considering moving into a new career path … Sure, it’s great to understand the market and it’s great to study your idols and to try to learn from them and pick up things, but the second that you’re ready to actually do it, I would recommend to unfollow all those people on Instagram because the fact that you’re actually taking action, it no longer matters what they’re doing. And it shouldn’t matter. It shouldn’t be relevant. I think it can be really unhealthy because now you’re always just comparing yourself to them rather than to where you were yesterday. That’s my piece of advice. I don’t know. Perhaps, for other people it’s different.

Christopher:                         Yeah. You know what? Comparing yourself to where you were yesterday is one of the most important things in success. The number one thing that they found, that when it comes to people that are actually moving forward, is having a scoreboard. And having that has to be one of the foundations so you actually know how you’re moving, from weight loss to stopping smoking to making money to all those things, having a scoreboard is key to success and everybody that gets it has one.

Taryn Southern:                 I love it. I love it. It’s great.

Christopher:                         The other part was … Sorry?

Taryn Southern:                 No. Go ahead.

Christopher:                         I was going to say the other part was when it comes to parents. A lot of millennials that are similar ages to us that haven’t taken the jump into what they truly want to do, there’s this expectation of family, this expectation of you go to university or college in your example and you get the job. We’re the one of the first generations to completely reject that and say, “Well, we can’t sit there. We can’t do that.” I know how I had to handle it but did you just kind of say, “Screw you. I’m just jumping in. This is what I want to do.” Was that your attitude to it?”

Taryn Southern:                 Yeah. I think … I’ve told [crosstalk 00:21:45] My parents have … My mother is in the same job that she started 35 years ago. I don’t know that … I don’t know. I shouldn’t speak on her behalf about how much she enjoys that job but my guess is that, not as much as she should. I think a lot of us as millennials, we’ve completely rejected the notions of success and happiness that worked before for our parents. We value freedom, we value purpose, and also we are the product of the information age so we have the ability to create whatever it is we want to create.

I mean, our parents didn’t have Craigslist. So, if you moved to a city and didn’t know anyone, I can’t even imagine how difficult it was to find an apartment. Nevermind all the tools we have at our disposal nowadays for learning and for meeting people. It’s amazing. I don’t … I guess I don’t know what else to say other than you have to be your own person. You have to … What was right for your parents should have no bearing on what is right for you and there is no better time as a millennial in college or right out of high school or right out of college or wherever you’re at, there’s no better time to take the risk and do it because as you get older, and as you become more set in your ways and the things that you like and don’t like and the people and once you have kids, which I don’t have, but I’m sure that once you do, everything really does change because your priority set changes and so this is the time to explore and figure it out.

I guess in my own personal experience with my parents, I did something that [inaudible 00:23:25] the best advice for everyone. I chose to tune them out for the first few years.

Christopher:                         Yeah.

Taryn Southern:                 I made the conscious decision that I’d rather not seek out their advice because I knew [inaudible 00:23:36] helpful and rather surround myself, create a new family so to speak, in terms of my work and surround myself with people that thought like I did and would be supporters.

Christopher:                         That’s another thing and here’s what’s really interesting about this conversation. You keep on hitting on points that I’ve heard from billionaires and hundred millionaire business owners. Like again and again and again, and one of them was just saying is, “You’ll never take money advice from a poor person. You’ll never take weight advice from an overweight person.” And so it doesn’t matter, whether they’re your family or not, you always go take that advice right from someone who’s where you want to be. There’s something else I just loved and here’s something that I believe and I just want to see if it’s true for you is the biggest risk you can ever take is that you’ll sacrifice right now and sometime in the future it will be disproportionately better that it’ll make up for not living true to who you are right now. How does that sit with you?

Taryn Southern:                 It gives me the eebie jeebies. It reminds me of the whole sort of framework that I grew up with, which is deferred life happiness and I just don’t subscribe to that. You cannot put off happiness and yeah, at the same time, you also cannot avoid pain, so let’s be really clear. Just because I’m doing what I love doesn’t mean that I don’t have weeks sometimes where I wake up in utter pain and like, just like not wanting to … Like, feeling unmotivated or not wanting to do [crosstalk 00:25:02] get me to where I want to be. There are absolutely aspects of what I do that I really don’t like. I think it’s really hard to find a career where everything is roses but the [crosstalk 00:25:09] is we value things that are hard and-

Christopher:                         Did you see that Jim Carrey video where he says … Oh gosh. He was like, “My dad failed as an accountant and I realized that you can fail at what you don’t like so you might as well do what you love.”

Taryn Southern:                 Yes.

Christopher:                         I just got reminded of that. You just brought that through me just then.

Taryn Southern:                 I love that. I saw that on Facebook and I absolutely pressed the thumbs up button. I-

Christopher:                         Pressed the thumbs up button.

Taryn Southern:                 That’s currently the case for me. There are painful moments of … All the time. And it’s a lot of hard work just like any other job and I’m sure this is something that you talk about on your podcast all the time but there’s no path to just like complete and utter [inaudible 00:25:55] happiness with what you’re doing. And to have that kind of expectation, I think is unreasonable, and only lends itself towards unhappiness. Maybe I’m being a really Buddhist in my attachment to detachment but I think you have to create reasonable expectations and ultimately … Yeah, I mean, I can imagine doing anything else now but I know that for every two days of awesomeness there’s going to be another two days of really tough stuff.

Christopher:                         Yeah.

Taryn Southern:                 But that’s okay. That’s life.

Christopher:                         It is. It is. What a beautiful life it seems that you’ve been able to create for yourself. You’re doing some really exciting stuff that I’ve seen. I was inspired to watch your VR, virtual reality, and what you think it’s doing and how you’re helping people and gosh it inspired me. I watched it twice and I’ve sent it to three people. It was a great video. Would you like to change tact a little bit? Let’s talk about why you think that VR is going to change the world and what you’re doing about it because it was a great, great video.

Taryn Southern:                 Thank you. So, I joke with people in the VR community here in LA, I’m now … There’s a bunch of different little micro VR community. I joke with them that I … The first time I put on a headset, I felt the same way I did as the first time watching a YouTube video. I was like, “Oh, my gosh. This is going to change everything. Everything.” That’s why I’ve jumped in. Like fully jumped in, in the same way that I did with YouTube, although it took me a few years to actually do it. With VR, I’m most excited because … Actually a few reasons. One, I told you I studied psycho tropes in college. So, the human mind and how our brain impacts our behavior is something that’s always been incredibly interesting to me.

I obviously have a passion for storytelling and entertainment and then you take that, you combine those things together with technology and you’ve got VR. I think that why I just naturally gravitate towards it. It’s the first medium that is completely immersive. It have the ability to, I think, completely impact state change and perception of reality faster than any other medium, which there can be some negative consequences to that. I’m aware of those but I think, for the time being, I certainly sit on the positive impact side and I think VR as a medium will completely change how we learn, how we socialize with other, and how we view the rest of the world. I don’t know if you had a chance to put on a Vive or an Oculus. If you haven’t done a Vive or an Oculus, then I say you haven’t done VR.

Christopher:                         Yes. Yes. I have. I’m hugely into it. I’m very excited about what’s around the corner and I’ve had such a tough year this year that it hasn’t been on my radar but this time last year, I was hugely into it and getting very excited about what’s possible. Here’s what I think about it is … You know we’ve talked for a long time about creating visions and you’re going to create your reality into the lure of attraction so it’s very difficult for people to change this state.

For me, when I put on the headset for the first time, it was instant because it was like I got to control the projector inside of my head with something outside of it because it was that real and I thought to myself, the very first thing that I thought was, “I’m going to be able to change people’s psychology. I’m going to be able to help them feel good. I’m going to help them.” And I was thinking to myself, you know, there’s these people that we lock up in prisons and they stare at a ceiling and they just get themselves more depressed. There’s people at hospitals. There’s people that … It’s always people that we can help with it and then I saw myself in you as you were out there talking in this video, I’m going, “Holey moley, that’s exciting.” What possibilities do you see for VR?

Taryn Southern:                 I love what you just said. That’s exactly how I feel about it. It really does lend itself towards instantaneous perception shift. How you said that it’s like a …. What was the word you used to describe the movie theater in one’s mind.

Christopher:                         It’s like a projector inside your head.

Taryn Southern:                 There you go. Yeah, it really is. I think it will … If we think about our brains as like an operating system and we’re all running software, right? Religion, politics, if you’re a vegan you’re running vegan software, and these things take in inputs and then spit out decisions, emotions, outputs, and I think that we’re in a really interesting time in the world. Given very obvious things going on in America and abroad where we are having a tough time finding each other. It could be that many of us are running on antiquated software systems in our brain and I think that now is the time to be having these conversations but VR presents a really exciting opportunity to upgrade the software and to be able to sit in someone else’s shoes. Maybe you’ve been in Wichita, Kansas, which you might’ve grown up for the last 30 years, and you haven’t really been outside of that, and so while your viewpoint is certainly valid and should be understood, it could be really helpful to see outside of that. VR gives you that opportunity in a way that other entertainment has never been able to offer. This is helpful for anyone in the world. I’m not saying this to just Wichita, Kansas people, LA. Whatever.

I think this offers us an opportunity to grow and learn as a conscious species. I don’t know exactly when that will come, how it will look like, maybe it won’t even be VR, maybe it’ll be contact lenses, maybe this is like some version of black mirror, but I see VR as the first step toward unifying us and making us understand, really the basis behind every thought, every decision that’s spinning through our brain. How can we really make this a better world for everyone?

Christopher:                         And the possibilities to me are everywhere with VR and I really want this conversation to be one of those things that I look back on because here’s what I know is we create medium, we create media, we create good content, and then advertisers come. For the first 10 years, it’s a lot of fun. It’s this new medium like social media and then the advertisers come and then it turns into a business. But there’s this time, and I can see in the next 18 months, just creating this new place where everyone’s connecting in this new virtual reality, this new thing. Maybe it’s the next three years, I don’t know how fast it’s going to show up but there’s going to be a way to combine that with social and it’s going to be people like you with amazing YouTube presence and actually doing it through a virtual reality. I am beyond excited.

Here’s something that happened two years ago. I attended a conference in Melbourne, Australia. Do you know Anthony Robbins?

Taryn Southern:                 I do not.

Christopher:                         You don’t know who Tony Robbins is? So Tony Robbins is-

Taryn Southern:                 Tony Robbins. Yeah. Of course.

Christopher:                         So, Tony Robbins. Tony, Anthony, same thing. So, Tony Robbins.

Taryn Southern:                 Anthony Robbins? Who is that?

Christopher:                         Who is that guy? Why does he put an [crosstalk 00:33:30]. He did a … Gosh. What was it? He did a hologram seminar where he was speaking and he was in … Was he in San Diego? No. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. He was somewhere in California and he hologrammed into over 1,000 people and did a whole day presenting as a hologram. And I sat there in that room and I went, “Oh yeah. This is happening.”

Taryn Southern:                 Here.

Christopher:                         It’s so much fun.

Taryn Southern:                 The future is here. We have … We will not recognize the world in 20 years and as scary as that can be to a lot of people, if you would’ve told your parents back in 1985 that they would have a smartphone with them everywhere they went and they would communicate and they would order food and they would date and they would do all of these things using this tiny device, they would’ve been terrified and they would’ve told you, “That sounds awful. I don’t want a world where that’s where we live,” and yet [inaudible 00:34:27] remarkably good at adapting to technology and making it useful and beneficial to them. So, I think we’ll figure it out but it’s really exciting.

Christopher:                         I mean like right now, we’ve got on this call we’ve got Austin, my marketing manager in Canada, and you’re in [inaudible 00:34:42] and I’m here and it’s crystal clear video. It’s like in the moment. I don’t actually know how this works so fast. It’s so crazy but I don’t know if you can remember the first time that Skype came out. I can still remember like the first time I got on Skype and it was like you could like see this pixelated image and it was delayed and everyone was okay with that. It was like, yeah but it’s this amazing thing. Now, I walk around on Facebook live down on the beach with 200 people around the world seeing me on live so, it is happening and it’s moving so fast and gosh, it’s been so exciting to me. I don’t know where it’s going but it’s so much fun just to be ahead and I love embracing change and meeting other people that on the forefront of that as well. Who knows where it’s going to go?

Taryn Southern:                 [crosstalk 00:35:30] never been a more exciting time to be alive?

Christopher:                         Gosh, I can’t.

Taryn Southern:                 I can’t.

Christopher:                         I can’t.

Taryn Southern:                 And if you enjoy watching thriller movies, this is definitely it. You don’t know what’s around any corner.

Christopher:                         Right on. Right on. Especially, you know, we’re filming this in January 2017 and there’s all sorts of stuff happening in this country and we’re both in the United States so who knows where that’s going to be when the listeners are listening to this but it a [inaudible 00:35:56] interesting time and I’m in this movie with Tony and a bunch of other people coming out. The movie’s called, “Rise Up,” and it’s really … I think we’re at this point where either we’re going to rise up and everyone’s going to move to a higher playing field, a higher consciousness, we’re going to go higher. It’s going to be full of love and compassion and connection and fun and joy. Well actually, no, that’s the only way it is going to go. I’m not going to put the other option. There is only one way and I’m excited for that.

Taryn Southern:                 Right. I think that’s great.

Christopher:                         I can’t believe that we’ve already gone over time.

Taryn Southern:                 Did we?

Christopher:                         Yeah. I normally try to keep this nice and short but that’s just how much I’ve enjoyed talking to you. [crosstalk 00:36:38] of all these things. Gosh, how to wrap this up? We’ve talked about so many different things. Actually, before we do, I’m just going to go over time, so listeners, we’re going to go for a little bit longer and I know that I try to keep it short but I want to hear what you’re doing the VR. I know that you’re in school to doing things and I’d love that you’d give a little plug and share what you’re doing and how people can support that because actually that would be very valuable and I’m not a new supporter but a massive supporter of everything you’re doing.

Taryn Southern:                 Oh, thank you so much. I started … I really appreciate that. I started an organization that focuses on VR for good, Tribe of Good. Our first initiatives are telling social impact stories using 360 video and VR. So, did a piece last fall on Mott’s Children’s Hospital out of Ann Arbor, Michigan. They’ve essentially been one of the first hospitals to use VR in their Children’s Cancer Units for pain management. We did a digital piece on them and then also a 360 piece where you could sit in the room with the kids doing VR for the first time in the hospital. Next week I’ve got another piece coming out for an organization called Wish of a Lifetime, which grants seniors with debilitating diseases a final wish. It’s a beautiful organization. We did a digital piece on this woman named Shirley who’s 72 years old and she’d always dreamed of racing a professional race car on a track so we tell her story but then we also put you in the race car with her in 360 video so you can experience what that was like for her [inaudible 00:38:19] track.

We’re focused on telling those kinds of stories. If people are interested or have a story that they want to tell or they know of an organization that would really benefit from this kind of thing, then they can just go to the facebook.com/tribeofgood page and submit there. Right now, I’m just, honestly I’m financing out of my pocket because I believe in it but I think that there will be a time very soon where brands will come in and see this is really good for the world and we should be supporting this and so I just want to encourage that kind of storytelling. Aside from that, Tribe of Good also places volunteers. We are enthusiasts in senior homes, homeless shelters, and children’s hospitals so that people can experience VR for the first time.

We’re still putting that program together. We’ve got a program here in LA. If you live in LA and you’re on the Facebook page, you can just shoot a message and we’ll sign you up to volunteer but we’ll be expanding that and basically just helping people figure out how to institute those volunteer programs in their local communities. If you’ve got a VR headset and you love VR or you can share the happiness.

Christopher:                         That’s awesome, man. And I want to request anyone out there listening that can support that mission or want to be a part of it that I think it’s a very, very cool thing and the way that we think about the world is … I love the word present. I just stumbled on that word. But present, the word presence, if you break it down, it’s actually pray sent. And so we’re actually pre-sending the present moment forward. So, I feel like if our emotion has already been present and that’s why it’s called the present and so the one thing that I’ve very excited about VR’s, I talk a lot about changing your psychology, changing your thinking. I think one thing it could do is it can literally change what you’re pre-sending because it’s controlling what’s being sent in such a bigger way than any meditation, anything has ever done before. That’s incredibly exciting to think that we really can change our thoughts and our programming in a controlled manner.

Taryn Southern:                 100%

Christopher:                         I’m excited to talk to you about that further. This has been an enlightening and exciting conversation. I feel so grounded and centered talking to you. It’s just been really, really nice. Where can everyone get in touch with you? Obviously on your YouTube. That will be in the show notes. I guess Facebook. It says that you’re on Instagram-

Taryn Southern:                 I’m on all of the mediums. It’s just my name, Taryn Southern. You can find me anywhere just depending on what your medium of choice is.

Christopher:                         I’d love you to just share just one last thought or comment with the listeners. How would you like to end off today? What’s something in your heart that you’d love everyone to hear from you today?

Taryn Southern:                 The pressure of possibility.

Christopher:                         There it is.

Taryn Southern:                 My one last thought … I guess my one last thought would be … Oh wow. I almost … The expectation of delivering a negative wisdom is crushing. I would leave everyone with … I’ll leave people with where I’m at now with something that I’m grappling with now, which is don’t be afraid of change and even if you make a decision and commit to something, you can always change your mind down the road. It’s better to commit and take action than to put something off and trying to make something perfect before actually putting it out there to the world. I think that’s really important and I just encourage people to take action and know that you can always change your mind later.

Christopher:                         I love that. Such a good piece of advice. Taryn Southern, thank you so much for spending time on the Freedom Fast Track podcast. It’s been such a pleasure and I feel so connected with what you’re doing and [inaudible 00:42:23] so thank you so much for taking your time out of your day to spend it with us and listeners, live with freedom. Free your mind, free your time, free your life. Do what matters most and do it right now.

Taryn Southern:                 I love it.

Christopher:                         Thank you so much. Yeah. Subscribe, like and share this episode and I’ll see you next week …

Christopher :                        My name is Chris Duncan your host. I interview top experts and guests who have achieved total freedom, and share with you the strategies that I have used to not just create one, but help over 200 people start a six figure freedom business where they can travel, enjoy their life, and make the money they truly deserve. Enjoy the show.

Welcome Freedom Fastrackers, today we’re in for a really, really cool [inaudible 00:00:33]. I’m here with Joshua from The Best Deodorant In The World, and we were just talking on the air Joshua about a lot of things man. You’re from Canada, and I’m sitting in Singapore, but I’m from New Zealand. First thing, I’m so grateful for this internet and I’m also grateful to be able to be here and talking to you today man, thanks for coming on.

Joshua:                                    Hey Chris, thanks so much brother. I appreciate you bringing me on today, it means the world to me. My wife Margaux and I are huge fans of you guys and what you’re doing with your podcast and your companies, and your seminars, and events, and everything that you got going on man, your new physical product company, you guys are absolute rock stars and we protect our time so heavily, but when we got an invite from you to come share and hopefully inspire some of your fans, then we couldn’t say, no.

Christopher :                        Thanks man, and that means the world. The same for us, I mean [Harriet 00:01:26] and I were just talking yesterday about your product, you know, The Best Deodorant In The World has changed our life, like literally. For so long we were struggling with trying to find a deodorant that didn’t have all the crap in it that actually worked.

Joshua:                                    Our story, I’m going to speak for Margaux as well, we have a newborn baby too, we’re on baby number three, so Margaux was unable to be here with me, but she’s with the new baby. Our journey started together 13 years ago, even prior to that we were entrepreneurs at our core. None of us came from much, I came from a single home with just my mom.

You know what, I’ll share a little bit of that story, and then kind of how it evolved, because I think it’s really important to know I came from nothing. I remember sleeping when I was just a little, little kid, like in a laundry hamper with clothes as my bed because we literally had nothing. Growing up my entire life I saw my mom struggle to put food on the table and keep a roof over our head, and as a single mom she was working non-stop and we didn’t grow up in a good neighborhood so I started to hang out with the wrong group of people, got involved in crime, got involved … never doing drugs, which is phenomenal, but definitely in that world, which then got me involved in a gang, which then got involved something that most people could only hear on the news, but involved in a gang war where I was involved in a shootout one day, and that was a real eye opener for me.

These are stories that I’ve never really shared, but I think it’s important that it doesn’t matter where you came from, your future can be whatever you want it to be. I came from that, got pushed out of high school, didn’t officially graduate, they kind of gave me a diploma so I would leave, so as that kind of kid, as always an athlete I ended up becoming a professional athlete.

What happened was I had over 17 concussions half of which were knocked unconscious. I was not able to continue playing sports anymore so that kind of opened my eyes, I had to choose a different path and I figured I should go to university, get a degree … because that’s what everyone was saying you should do.

Got into university on a sports scholarship, again, if it wasn’t for sports I probably would be dead. Right after getting in I quite playing basketball for the school because it’s not what I wanted to do, I just wanted to get into school, but I was in, and it was cool.

After my first year Margaux and I kind of reconnected, we’d known each other for a long time, and we both were like, this isn’t what we want to do, and this was the start of our entrepreneurial journey. We had no idea what we wanted to do, we ran into someone who was a real estate developer and we were like, “Wow, that sounds cool, we should do that.”

I came from nothing, Margaux didn’t come from much, and somehow we raised a million dollars and built our very first townhouse development, and we actually won the best development of the year award for that. That was the start of our entrepreneurial journey together. I always look at it and say, because we didn’t know any different, we didn’t know things weren’t possible, we didn’t know that two young 20 year old people with no experience or background could go out and raise a million dollars and then build a townhouse development with no construction background, and succeed at it.

Christopher :                        I just have to pause you for a second because I need you to know just how crazy similar you and I are. [inaudible 00:05:19] I didn’t know anything about this, and I don’t think Joshua knew this either. I played basketball for my country, I played for New Zealand, I got a scholarship to go to university because of basketball. I had an injury that stopped me playing basketball. Before that I was in so much trouble, I was standing in front of courts [crosstalk 00:05:43]. I got kicked out of high school [inaudible 00:05:47] given a free ticket to university because I was just in so much trouble and had to learn how to make money to pay off all these debts that I owed to the government in New Zealand. I’m like the [inaudible 00:05:58] I’m listening to you say this I’m going, “Holy crap, this is literally insane, I’ve never experienced this before, this is so cool.” I just wanted to let you know that that’s creepy.

Joshua:                                    It gave me goosebumps, and it’s amazing because we’ve never spoken before in our lives and other than a few real great mutual friends. That’s the way we got connected. That’s incredible, our stories are so close, amazing, amazing. Thanks for sharing that.

Christopher :                        You made the money and you just did it because you didn’t know anything else, and I think that’s such an important part. Also, I always find sports people. I think brother, as sports minded people I think creates such success, and I’m going to bring that up a little bit later as well, but I’d love you to continue. You made all this money, made the development with the townhouses. What next?

Joshua:                                    What happened after that is, that’s when Margaux and I started to learn about the internet, which was about 13 years ago or so now, but that’s where we really started to discover the internet. We got involved in network marketing at the time. I’m not a fan of it, I’m not someone who’s going to promote it or endorse it, it was definitely a great experience, we learned a lot, we actually became- In the two years we were involved in that industry we became one of the top earners in a global company that was in some 50 some countries, we were in the top 10 earners of that company. We did really well, and I always attribute it to, we didn’t know any different, we didn’t know even what that industry was at the time.

What happened was, at the end of our two year period … because it’s a story that people hear all the time, work for a season, or work for a couple years and get paid for the rest of your life, which we quickly realized is a big load of shit … what happened was at the end of the two years [inaudible 00:07:51] like hey, you know what, we’ve worked 80 hours a week for two years, why don’t we enjoy each other and start traveling for ourselves? We just stopped, we just kind of disconnected from everything and started traveling and having fun.

One day we woke up and we weren’t getting paid anymore, you go from a very, very substantial income which you justify your lifestyle with it, with beautiful houses and cars, and it’s gone. They knew we couldn’t fight it, so it really opened our eyes to that space, they didn’t want to pay someone who was no longer supporting or building that business. Yeah, it was an awesome experience.

What we did do at that point, is we then started consulting because we got to know a lot of really great people in that space, we started consulting within a lot of these corporate networking marketing companies, which really opened our eyes to the way they really treat people and how they view their distributors and things like that. After about a year or so of that we realized we didn’t want anything to do in that space ever again, it was just not for us, it didn’t jive with who we were as people, and [inaudible 00:09:02] that point we were trying to figure out … this was when gold was really starting to spike in the marketplace.

I think it was right around 350 when we got involved, and we started a gold and silver refinery up in British Columbia, Canada, and we had a great run with that for a year-and-a-half or so until it … it started getting really scammy at that point. Everyone was coming in and claiming to buy gold online and people getting scammed, and we didn’t want to be involved in it anymore at that point. We had a good run, had fun, tons of experience, and it was kind of at that point where we had a bit of a health scare. Margaux was constantly having migraines and chest palpitations and was going to the hospital literally once a month for something, and we were young and on the outside we looked super healthy, we were always active, always into something, and I started developing two lumps in my chest. It was an eye opener for us.

What we did, is we started … this was kind of the real switch where we started looking into health, nutrition, and toxins, and environmental toxins, and everything that starts playing a role in our health. The lumps in my chest … I’d show you if my video worked, for some reason it’s not … they were really close to my armpit and the only thing the doctors, the specialists, and we could come up with, was it’s probably attributed to different toxins within deodorant. I’d used Old Spice … I’m not saying it was Old Spice … but I’d used Old Spice since I was a kid and they have a lot of harmful ingredients in that product.

It opened our eyes and that’s when Margaux was like, “I’m going to make my own deodorant.” because we literally bought every natural deodorant on the shelf at the time and nothing worked, and being active, and we were always sweating, and Margaux didn’t like [inaudible 00:10:52]. That’s when she really decided that we’re going to make one, and it was never to sell or anything like that. That would be eight years ago or so, ish, but it was really cool, she created it, never thought of it as a business, we were still doing- At that time we were actually doing, again, more consulting and speaking, and we just kind of kept going with that. Then what happened is some friends and family wanted to try the product and then some stores wanted to carry the product, and it just grass-roots grew that way, and literally over the course of a few years we figured, “Okay, well, we should really turn this into a company.” because it wasn’t a company, it was nothing.

We ended up doing well over a 100,000 people just to [tap 00:11:41] to find a formula that was just amazing. We spent a ton of money not realizing how much it actually cost to setup a physical product company, developed a product that actually worked, and then we’re like, “Okay, well, let’s get it out there.” Then it’s like, “Oh wow, well, you know [inaudible 00:11:58] 10,000 units for this it’s like 80 [inaudible 00:12:02]. Tons of research, tons of testing, then we manufacture everything in North America, we have a factory in Canada, and a factory in the United States. All our packaging now, the one that you have is kind of the collectors edition now, but all the new stuff is all custom made for us so you can’t get it anywheres else.

The new boxes the product comes in, everything, the costs just to get to the point before you order your final product is astronomical, and that’s something no one ever told us, so we never took an investor on ever, what we always did during this process is we either flipped some properties to get some investments through that … because we already had experience with that … or we would take on consulting clients in that 50 to 100 thousand dollar range, to again fund research and development, and getting these things to the next level.

Yeah, it’s been that period and it’s kind of at that stage now where it’s that next state of, “Okay, the next investment’s about a million dollars, and how are we going to structure that without getting an investor?” That’s kind of been the journey with that.

Christopher :                        What a great journey man. There’s a few big points I really love [inaudible 00:13:18]. You know I’m just very inspired by your ability to shift and make things happen, it’s phenomenal. The thing that I love is that you really, really, really seem to win at what you do, and that’s awesome brother.

Joshua:                                    Sorry, Chris, just on that point, because I think it’s important for people to know. I don’t mean to cut you off at all. Two things, one, we designed this as a lifestyle company for us, which means the last two-and-a-half years we’re kind of settled now in British Columbia, Canada, but the two years before that we traveled the world with our kids while growing this company, which a lot of people don’t think you can do with a physical product company, but we traveled and lived in six or seven different countries with our kids.

The other side of that is, we went bankrupt in this process, we’re completely transparent. We lost everything, everything, but because … just like you guys … we know how to start again, we know where your value lies, that’s something you can’t forget, is what your personal value is to the world. It was never an issue for us to go back out and create more revenue and start over, but I think it’s important that people know, when you’re playing at a bigger level your losses are huge.

Christopher :                        I’m with you man. I feel you on that one. For us we’ve got such an aligned journey, I mean we went vegetarian and [Harriet 00:14:57] vegan for 2 years after she suffered massive migraines, [Harriet 00:15:01] went gluten-free, and always on such a big path on how do we get the most [inaudible 00:15:10] and what’s the truth? I guess what it really seems is you’re a truth seeker as well, and after actually getting out there and finding the truth, and finding the new way- I feel like so many people right now are just on this new vibe and this new way, and that’s just so cool isn’t it? It sometimes just blows me away about how many people are awake to this new stuff, it’s absolutely freaking exciting.

What’s next for you guys? You’re looking for a larger- What’s that next level, where are you guys headed?

Joshua:                                    The next level for us right now is taking this company- We set a goal that we would love to hit 10 million dollars in 2017, whether or not we do it I could care less, even if we come close I’m happy, but we’ve redesigned everything. You go to the site right now it’s the old site and it hasn’t been touched because I just don’t care [inaudible 00:16:04] focused on the new one, and merging our family of products under that new-

Joshua:                                    Margaux and I, we are completely focused with our kids, our kids are number one in our life, spending time with them trumps everything else in the world, and giving them a better start than what we had, and the information that we learned over the last 13 years together about nutrition, and toxins, and environmental toxins, and how they affect our bodies, and the ingredients in food and how they interact with our chemistry and how all these things play a role in how we live. We want to set our kids up for a better future, but also this company.

You’ll see this as the new site and everything roles out, it has a huge focus on education, there’s going to be a podcast and video series, and education component built into it where we share literally our last 13 years of experience of going down this path ane eliminating toxins and adding in specific types of foods and nutrients, and what that means and what that does. That’s going to be a huge component of the company moving forward. It’s not about selling deodorant, that’s kind of a byproduct, but our mission is really to go out and impact people with this.

Christopher :                        When an entrepreneur shifts into contribution like that, the world just opens up. I think I’ve listened to people, I see [inaudible 00:18:41], the opposite, you know, chase the money, chase the money, chase the money. [inaudible 00:18:48] is, it’s kind of level one, you need to get out of the gate eventually and actually make some revenue [inaudible 00:18:54] gained your skills and do the [golf 00:18:58] thing, then the shift happens when it really focuses on contribution and making something bigger and better than yourself.

I’d love to ask you, was that true for you? Did you have a moment where it shifted from the money to doing something bigger, or it was it just always about doing something bigger?

Joshua:                                    It was always about something bigger, but you lose focus. I find when we were younger, I’m not old, but when we were younger, you really had to focus on- I think a big part of that was, we came from nothing, and the fact that- We went through a phase where we were driving the biggest fanciest car in our city, and that made me feel good, but that was a such a bad reason to do it, but it was a shift.

Literally, that moment when we lost everything, you know, we lost our house, we had no food, we had no money to buy food, it was literally starting from scratch, that was ar real eye opener to come out and provide contribution at a higher level. If you look for Margaux and I online you won’t find much, because you don’t need to have a persona and all this stuff online to be successful in business, but what we discovered through this process is we have a great skillset that adds tons of value to other people and that we can help them grow their companies and we can leverage that and help us grow our company.

We took the approach that if you’re honest and just don’t lie … because you know as well as I do, we’re in the same circles and when you’re on Facebook everybody’s newsfeed is just full of rubbish and all these people claiming to make you a bunch of money. First of all, I’m not saying ads don’t work and some of those people aren’t super successful, because a lot of them are good friends of mine and they do great work and they’re very successful, but you don’t need to do that to be successful on the internet.

Most of those people it’s just a big fraud, it’s a big facade, they’ve never made money for themselves ever in any space, yet they’re out there saying, “Hey, let me teach you how to become super successful on the internet.” It’s dropping that whole, stop fucking lying. If more people would stop lying, no one cares what kind of car you’re driving, no one cares what house you live in.

We moved from fancy homes, and big cities, and fancy cars that are flashy, to, we live up in the mountains in British Columbia in a half eco house powered by nature and we drive big pickup trucks because that’s what we like and that’s what gets us around, and that’s what keeps us safe. It’s not about the other stuff anymore. Once you realize who you are you can figure that out.

Christopher :                        That’s a huge part of it, is actually realizing that part. It’s said that man first learned to talk and then next thing went to lie straight away because there seems to be this abundance … and I talked about one of our big mutual friends, Alex, a lot about this is, this abundance of coaches, coaches to coach coaches, [crosstalk 00:21:57] coaching. It can draw in people at that lower level wanting just to get out the gutter, get out of the rut, get out of that stuck place, and I feel like it can really hold people down, especially if the information isn’t valid.

Let’s [inaudible 00:22:18] little parts of this. What would be your advice or tips to that new entrepreneur that’s got their products and is wanting to get moving? How would you coach them from a place of having already done it right now?

Joshua:                                    I’d just tell them, if they’re in a physical product company and they’re not doing, fulfilled by Amazon, buying it on Alibaba, or something like that, they literally went out, developed a product. First of all, I would say, whatever your product is, make sure it’s the best. Our company became called “The best deodorant in the world,” because our customers were saying … we never had a brand … were saying, “It’s the best deodorant ever used.” We’re like, “Oh shit, we should just call it the best in the world.”

What we’ve done recently, we took our formula which took years and 100,000s if not a million dollars to get that formula to where it is, and we’ve recently hired a lady who for 40 years have been formulating natural products, and we gave it to her … no one’s ever seen our formula other than her … we gave it to her and asked her to make it better, because why should we stay at a certain level? We know it can be better, so we’ve paid her a fortune, now to get it to the next level because it’s worth it to us.

Whatever your product is, don’t come out with a product that’s inferior or as good as whoever you’re going up against. Get it better, make it better or you’re not going to last. Sure you can go out with fancy marketing techniques and what not and get a spike and do okay, but it doesn’t take long for people to find out how crapy it is.

That’d be my first piece of advice, is stand out from a product standpoint. Second one is, understand how much it actually costs to do this. It’s not selling info products. You see people go belly up all the time selling info products, add some R&D to the equation, add product minimums to the equation, add all this stuff, it changes. I think it’s really important to understand that it’s not cheap to do it, and you need to have … whether it’s an investor, which we’ve never had, we’ve always been our own investor … I’d never be opposed to taking one on if it’s the right partner, but come up with a backend strategy that you can fund your company. The last thing you want to do is take your personal finances, drain your bank account, put yourself in a precarious situation to fund something that you’re not 100 percent sure it’s even proven if it’s going to work.

Those would be my first two step. Prove that it works, make sure it’s better, and make sure you have enough money to get it over the hump.

Christopher :                        I think that that second thing, having enough money, if you really going to go into the products, that’s something to really consider because- Also, to feel and feel into abundance. This is something I learned right down the end of my entrepreneur journey, is that there are actually people out there that want to invest in products and if you tell the truth and share in a happy to play win-win they do have the money.

Coming from New Zealand and maybe it’s a bit different growing up in North America, maybe there’s a little bit more access, but I always felt that you had to get this Facebook idea to attract a million bucks or half a million bucks, and what I’ve realized in my second part of my decade of being a entrepreneur is just how much people do want to invest in people who have great ideas and great products. I just want to put some weight behind that and say, people can go out there and find it, it’s there.

Self-funding is also fun.

Joshua:                                    It would be nicer to keep all that money yourself, but when you have a vision and a dream- Let me share this story because I think it’s important because we are talking about physical products and money to get over the hump and how things can happen, and Alex knows this story because he was working with us directly when this happened.

We were in the process of switching manufactures from South Florida to Portland, Organ, and we had one last shipment shipping out from Florida to our American distribution center. Normally we ship FedEx or UPS and for some reason the manufacture shipped it through some third-party shipping company I’d never even heard of, and we had about 20,000 units disappear. If you put that to a dollar figure, it’s $100,000 in product minimum, you add everything else to that, gone. Boom.

The insurance on the product based off what the people who shipped it, it was $5,000. It wasn’t even worth my time to go through the months of paperwork to try and claim $5,000, but this is something that puts little tiny things like this can put people out of business overnight. We’re not seeling e-books, we’re not selling digital courses, this is really physical products, and we have to understand that things happen that are completely out of your control, maybe it’s the universe sending me a sign and maybe I pissed somebody off and that was a way of getting back at me, I don’t know, that comes with speaking the truth I guess. But yeah, the things that happen in the physical space …

Christopher :                        I love that, you’re so right. I’ve got two questions man, and I ask it every time. I think these two questions, most listeners skip to, because I’m watching my stats listeners and I know that you’ve skipped to this part, and it’s that part again, but listen to the rest of the episode it was great. These two questions everybody loves, because what they do is they really try to draw out what it is that as somebody [inaudible 00:28:27] where they want to be would do. The first part of the question says, if you could time travel and go back to the beginning 13 years ago when you were starting and you had five minutes to sit and give that old version of you advice … let’s just pretend that’s right now … what would you say?

Joshua:                                    If I traveled back 13 years I’d say, first of all stop lying, be true to yourself, go get an investor. That’s what I’d tell myself 13 years ago, but when we got to the point with this company, I had enough skillsets and Margaux had enough skillsets that we could help other companies impact their revenue from a positive standpoint and get paid well for that, and it doesn’t take a ton of effort on our side to do those things, so we were able to do that and then invest that money into this company, so 13 years ago I wouldn’t have had the skillset, so I definitely would have said, prove the model, make sure there’s demand, go out and get somebody to stand behind you.

Christopher :                        Nice. The other part of the question is this, if right now you lost it all [crosstalk 00:29:48] all the connections, all the money, all the social media, there’s nothing, you literally get wiped and you had to start again, how do you start? What are the steps you take and how do you make it happen?

Joshua:                                    I never say enough about Margaux, she is the heart that makes this engine beat when it comes to all of our companies, and if we lost today, like we literally woke up tomorrow and had no connections, we just had our skillset and what we’re good at and can accomplish and were going into the physical products, I would go out with Margaux, she is the- When it comes to connections and getting to know powerful people in powerful places she is the queen of the world at that. She knows everybody who matters in any space that we’re in. That’s where I would start.

I will say, I would go out- J Abram said it best I think, I would find someone who has the audience that I need for my product and partner with them. That’s probably one of the most eye opening things I heard years ago from him among with a billion other things. Literally, if you’re a physical product company and you don’t have an investor and you literally just say, okay, I’ve got the prototype, I know there’s people looking for it … because you can get to that point really inexpensively and quite easily … is then say, okay, who [inaudible 00:31:20]? Who is that person that has my audience?

If you make engines for scooters then maybe your ideal partner is someone who makes engines for lawnmowers and they don’t run the second shift of their factory, so you go to them, you partner with them and you have a great partnership. They’re going to produce all your engines fully on your dies, and then they have an adience already that can use that type of product and you’ve got the reach. That’s what I would do.

Christopher :                        Partnerships is always the fastest way. I feel that the young entrepreneur and the new entrepreneur [inaudible 00:31:56].

Joshua:                                    Self-made man is an amazing podcast that we listen to all the time. It’s tight, it’s like yours, it’s great content, it’s tight, it’s to the point, and you can always leave with something powerful. Garrett J. White, I’m a huge fan of Garrett’s, he speaks the truth, he’s on a mission, he’s helping men, which is good. A big thing for Margaux kind of on our next step here is helping families live a better life, helping families reconnect with each other, husbands and wives. We put our relationship above anything else, we put our kids above anything else, and we spend more time working on ourselves and our relationship, and relationship with our kids than we do on anything else.

You know many of the people I know, and see it all the time, they lose focus on the wife, they lose focus on their husband, lose focus on the kids, they cheat on each other, there’s so much stuff that goes on, they disconnect which then leads them to look elsewhere and it’s not good. This journey’s kind of led us to that point of seeing that so many people that we know and work with, their relationships fall apart and the relationship with their kids fall apart because they’re not focused on that, they simply focus on the business side.

Anybody who has kids, we follow more kids in the parenting space than the business space, Dr. Peter Gray, Free to Learn, if you want to read a book [inaudible 00:33:35] Garrett White, Dr. Peter Gray.

Christopher :                        That gives a good rundown of exactly- I feel you brother, I feel you. Mike does have a great podcast, it’s awesome. I feel like we could just sit here and just talk for ages, and I really feel like … and I said this at the beginning but I think it might have been off air … that I felt we were just catching up like old friends, but for the first time. It’s been a very different episode I guess of the Total Freedom podcast because I kind of feel like I’m just sitting here getting to know you, and it’s been extremely valuable to listen and hear some of your insights and what you’ve done.

Here’s my brief summary is, what I get from you is the ability to take action, but also to know your truest and highest values, you stay true to highest goals and what really matters to you. Your ability to be stunningly honest is so obvious that it’s leads to a massive amount of success. I love you talked about partnerships. In nearly every sense I get the feeling that collaboration is huge to you. If you were to give advice it would to collaborate with someone who can invest and then if I’m starting from now I would have my wife help us get partnerships is really, really cool.

Man, we do have to wrap up the show, I’m sure we’re going to be connecting more, but I’d love to ask, is there anything else you’d like to leave with the listeners today? What feels right for you?

Joshua:                                    You know, the only thing I would leave with everybody, thank you for summarizing it that way, you give me too much credit, and it definitely does feel like we’ve known each other for years which is really nice, it’s very special. I really can’t wait to meet you guys, you seem like such an incredible couple, I know one of these days our paths will cross for sure.

I think it’s important to know, and anybody who hasn’t read Alex Sharpton’s book Entrepreneur Personalty Type, you should read it if you’re an entrepreneur because it definitely speaks to who we are as individuals and brings a lot of clarity to things, understanding that you’re not broken.

I don’t talk about it a lot, but I’m a bit bipolar, I have days where I am on and I am on fire and I am just on a mission to change the world and move boulders, than there’s days where I’m just clinically depressed and don’t want to get out of bed. It’s hard, not everyday is like this, literally, let me just tell you really quick how my day looks.

Everyone’s always like, “I’m up at 5, I do this I do that, I go to the gym, I work all these hours, blah, blah, blah.” Margaux and I, when it comes to our company work very few hours. We get up at 5:30, we do some exercise, kids get up, we do breakfast together, our kids are now going to a nature school, so literally from 6:30 to 10:30 we’re doing family time with our kids, then they’re kind of in a nature program for a few hours, that’s when we get the bulk of our work done, so in any given day we do four solid hours of laser-focused work to get all the things done that need to be done.

We have a small team, but within those four hours we get everything done. Anybody who tells you you need to work 13, 14, 16, 18 hours a day, that’s absolute insanity. You don’t need to, you just need to be productive in the time that you work. We pick up our kids, and then all five of us hang out and we do family time again until 6:30 or so when the kids go to bed, then Margaux and I have special time together and I might do another hour or so before bed.

I think it’s important for people to hear that because every time I listen to somebody it’s literally like, “Yeah, I get up early, I work all day, have supper, I work all night.” I think if you are focused on what you really are after you can get a lot done in a short period of time.

Christopher :                        I just took a bunch of notes on that, that sounds like a fantastic [inaudible 00:37:27], it really does. I’m going to put that in the show notes for everybody so they can go and have a look and see that it’s possible.

Joshua:                                    That comes down to- I don’t want to say people’s priorities are messed up, but a lot of them are messed up. They put going out and making money and growing their company way above their kids and their spouse, and then they wonder why they’re so disconnected. I find if I’m connected with my wife, my queen, my kids, my work, my workouts go so much better, my health is better, my work just thrives, it’s amazing how that happens, but it’s just rearranging what’s really important in life.

Christopher :                        Right. Brother, what a great way to finish. Listeners, I highly recommend you get over to the BestDeodrantInTheWorld.com, try it out, you’ve got my recommendation, I’ve been using it for the last few months, it changed our life [inaudible 00:38:25] best place to go right now, really. It’s safe enough to eat [inaudible 00:38:33] going they make so much sense [inaudible 00:38:34]. This one is safe enough [inaudible 00:38:41] sense. We didn’t go into it too much because we were talking about [inaudible 00:38:47]. I think maybe if we could Margaux we have [inaudible 00:38:50] conversation that I think listeners would love to hear more about toxicity and removing all those things, but just massive heartfelt thanks man. Thanks for being on the show, thanks for [inaudible 00:39:02], really appreciate you.

Joshua:                                    Yeah man, I appreciate you having me on, it means a lot. If you ever want to just have Margaux on, she’s got two books coming out this year that were both co-authored. One specifically about toxins in food, and another one on parenting, but yeah, if your audience wants that stuff you let her know. We appreciate you guys, it means a lot you had us on, we really look forward to supporting you guys in your growth to.

Christopher :                        Thanks brother. Listeners out there, live with freedom, for your mind, for your time, for your life, like, subscribe, and share this episode and we’ll see you on the next show. Bye for now.

Christopher D.                    Welcome to the Freedom FastTrack Podcast. I’m here with Scott Oldford and Scott, I’ve been waiting for this podcast for a while. We were actually booked in last year and it didn’t happen, but now it’s the right time. If you don’t know Scott, I don’t know where you’ve been. I’ve been liking his stuff and his emails are just on point, everything he’s doing on Facebook, but Scott’s got a great story and I don’t want to jump in there and share too much about it, but he founded a company, Infinitus, he’s been able to build and help … I think it’s 5,000 entrepreneurs now.

We’ve had Russell Brunson on the show. Russell’s someone I look to massively as well, but you know what listeners? I look to Scott a lot as well. He’s one of the few people I actually read emails from. So listeners, I think we’re into a really, really, really great session today. The first half of the session we’re going to be talking through Scott’s story, the amount of debt that he got into, and how you can build out and start a company. Then in the second half, if you’re making $100,000 and you just want to go to a million and you want to skip Scott’s story, you can skip straight to there if you like as well.

So Scott, welcome to the show brother, it’s exciting to have you here.

Scott Oldford:                      Awesome to be here, man. I’m looking forward to share a little bit of story but also sharing some information that hopefully you can deploy directly into the business if you’re listening to this. I realize if you’re listening to this, you’re kind of super valuable, so I know both of us respect that and we’re going to kick some ass.

Christopher D.:                   Yeah, we are dude, and I’m just excited that you want to just get straight into deploying stuff and getting action because the one thing about what I see from you online more than anything is results. You just showing up results. We screenshotted, I think I screenshotted four of your posts last week, because you’re like, “Oh, here’s how you can get podcast, I’m going to screenshot that. Oh, here’s how to do this.” Then you send us the Facebook group thing and I’m like, “[Austin 00:02:16] are we talking to this dude next week right?” He’s like, “Yeah.” I’m like, “Oh my god.” We’re like ripping all this stuff. It’s been awesome, but you don’t end up there clearly to be able to have all those results and do those things you have to start out somewhere, so I’d love you to take us through your story. You’ve been in an incredible amount of debt and I’ll kind of shut up and let you go because I think it’s an incredible stroy and I’d love my listeners to hear it as well.

Scott Oldford:                      Sure man, definitely. Well like a lot of entrepreneurs, it happened by mistake. Definitely by mistake in my case. I started my first entrepreneurial endeavor when I was seven, selling eggs on my parents’ [inaudible 00:02:51] back in a little village, 13 people in a small little place in Newfoundland, Canada, which is on the east coast of Canada. From there, I was this little geeky fat kid when I was 9, 10 years old. Start learning HTML and CSS, started programming. Realized I sucked at that, but what I was really good at, I was really good at understanding someone’s problem and then finding someone to be able to fix that problem.

So what I had done, I was 16 years old, and I have this quite successful company for being 16, and then up until that point I didn’t even know I was an entrepreneur. I didn’t even know the amount of money going into my PayPal account was a pretty good deal of money. Then essentially what happened is I was discovered, per se, and so people started calling me an entrepreneur. I had no idea I was. I didn’t grow up with wealthy parents or anything from that perspective.

By the time I was 21, I was starting investing in all these businesses, I started letting my ego drive me, I started being really honestly a douchebag, if I really kind of go back to it. But I over-leveraged myself, and while I had a lot of success, by the time I was 21, 22, I found myself $726,000 in debt, and of course you kind of have to have a bit of money to get into that level of debt. It’s June 2013, which is about three and a half years ago, and I’m like, “Shit. What do I do?” So at the time I sold out to an agency back in 2012, to try to avoid bankruptcy, and kind of fell into depression. Used to wake up every morning around 10, used to get home at like six or seven, drink, smoke weed just to try to forget about how shitty my life is right now.

I think it’s a lot easier when your life is shitty consistently, but it’s a lot harder when you know what life is like when it’s good versus what it’s like when it’s not. Or at least I think so. So I started Infinitus in June of 2013 when I just had enough of that crap, and I sold everything that was belonged to me, I raised a basic three months of cash by selling everything I had, and then I just went and hustled. I think the mindset change for me was I believed my own kool-aid for far too long, and I looked out and I was like, “How can people serve me?” Instead of, “How can I serve them?”

So it was a methodology we are all, as entrepreneurs, we are all the kings and queens of our kingdom. Moment that a king or queen serves him or herself is the moment that they lose the kingdom. Nobody wants to serve somebody who just serves themselves. Kind of come into this realization on a walk while I was just crying on a June summer evening and just being like, “I’m sick of it. Enough is enough.” So that day was one turning point of the past three and a half years.

Since then I started an agency in basically June/July of 2013, I did that 2014, we did $996,000 in revenue, which gave me a little bit of a boost. Now I’ve always had an agency, so by the end of 2014 I was like, “Man, I hate what I’m doing. I wake up, I still don’t like what I’m doing. I’m making money but I don’t like what I’m doing.” So in February of 2015 I was like, “Screw this. I’m moving. I’m firing everybody in my company. I have $30,000 in my bank account. I don’t care what I’m going to do, but I’m not doing that.”

That essentially lead up to today. Which is e-learning for entrepreneurs. Helping at this point in time, helping them with their online lead generation. Because the number one reason why somebody that’s at 100k or 200k can’t get the seven figures is because of lead generation. They can’t get to the point of being able to use leverage. They can’t create a sustainable business, they can’t create a scalable business because they don’t have any cash. So if you fix that problem, you now have cash to fix the rest of the problems, such as delivery, operations, finances, blah blah blah blah. Then of course this is what happened for me to go in debt many years ago.

So in 2015 we did half a million in six months. This year we did just below three million. And 2017, minimum goal is eight million. I think we can easily do 12. So this has been a … There is only so much you can fail, there is only so much you can iterate. There is only so much you can do before you kind of figure out the path. That’s really what it’s been. I’m 25, I’m very, very grateful for the people that are around me. I invest heavily in the knowledge, I invest heavily in my community, and I invest heavily in my connections. Those are the three things that if I ever go broke again, the bank can’t take away from me. That’s the story, man. That’s really it.

Christopher D.:                   It’s a really inspiring story, brother, and you know what I’m really impressed with where you’ve been able to get to at 25 and what you’ve been able to do, and it’s going to show a massive level of maturity, the things that you’re saying, which is huge. I’ve had a similar meltdown and breakdown, which my listeners already know about, so I know exactly what that’s like, and I know exactly where you’re at as well, so that’s huge. So let me ask you the question. If someone’s listening in right now and they’re in that place that they want to start out and they don’t really know where to start or what to do, what is some of your advice to somebody if they’re in that place right where you were, how would you suggest that they get started?

Scott Oldford:                      Well, the first 100k comes from pure hustle, grit and honestly doing whatever it takes to create momentum. The rule of momentum is essentially that you must create momentum and then do everything in your power to reduce friction, because of course things that are in motion stay in motion unless equal forces apply.

So based on that, what I would do is look at, okay who has money that can pay me? What can I figure out that they need? And how do I solve a pain? How do I solve a pain? And get into the bullshit email, I mean again, this is bad for my business, probably bad for lots of other businesses, but this is what I would do. If you’re flat out broke, you have no money to be able to pay for Facebook ads, you got no money to be able to pay for software, for a landing page, [inaudible 00:09:33], all these different types of things. I think a lot of people make online marketing seem a lot easier than it is.

Yes, it can be easy, yes it can be done, yes it can be effective. I’ve done it and I’ve helped a lot of other people do it, but you’re flat out broke. You’re starting at ground zero. It’s being able to find a pain that 10 or 20 businesses have and being able to figure out how to get them to pay you upfront to solve that pain, maybe going out and figuring out how to actually solve that pain. You don’t have to be an expert, you don’t have to be a guru to solve someone’s pain. A lot of the time, you just have to spend enough time figuring out how to solve that pain. Once you have someone paying you for it you’ll be able to leverage that.

Once you get to 100k, it’s a totally different ballgame. It’s a totally different ballgame because now you have to start leveraging yourself. But at the end of the day, if you put 18 hours a day into your skill and into your knowledge and it going out and just trying to get as many people as possible they know you, you will get to 100k in less than 12 months guaranteed unless you’re a flat out idiot. Right?

Christopher D.:                   True that.

Scott Oldford:                      Or you just keep telling yourself this bullshit story that in your head every single day that you’re never not going to be broke. I mean, I’m sure you’ve seen it. I have all kinds of skeptics and the haters that reply to my emails being like, “Bullshit.” Or “Facebook ads, whatever.” It’s the same people that are broke as shit and you choose if you’re broke or not.

Christopher D.:                   I’m with you, dude. I’m totally with you. And it’s sometimes so funny because people want to stay there instead of actually going, “You know what? I need to be vulnerable and make a massive shift.” And before we started I was telling you about how great I’ve seen your vulnerability and how much I’m just loving your message. And I said that to Austin, I said, “I’m really excited to talk to Scott and to really hear what it is you’re doing.” I nearly say the exact same thing, so listeners just know that they need to freakin’ start.

So let’s shift from those people. If you haven’t heard that message, hear it now, turn off the podcast, get out there, get a service and get started. Scott, what do you think is going to happen in 2017 when it comes to marketing? Where do you think that the marketing’s moving?

Scott Oldford:                      I think there’s a couple of big things. I just published specifically on Facebook advertising, because of course it’s hot and wonderful and earning great. But overall as marketing, here’s what’s going to happen both 2017 and beyond. 2017, if you are … There’s three different types of leads, I talk about this all the time. There’s sidewalkers, slow laners, fast laners. Essentially it means that somebody that’s in the sidewalk aren’t relevant of a pain. Someone in the slow lane is relevant that there’s a pain in their life, business relationship, and they’re looking for the process of they’re looking for the knowledge and they’re looking for the authority to look up to. Then someone in the fast lane is ready for a solution. They’re looking for the elixir. How do I solve this? What do I pay for it? What’s my resources?

Now, if you think you can go to all those three people with exact same messaging and exact same marketing funnel, the exact same video, the exact same lead magnet, the exact same webinar, you’re totally wrong. The only reason anyone’s gotten away with it up to this point is simply because of the fact that traffic has been so cheap. Well, in six months, in 2016 we went from three million advertisers to four million on Facebook. It’s only going to get higher and it’s only going to get more cost effective.

Now let’s think about another thing. All the brands, all the big brands, Gary Vaynerchuk talked about this about a month and a half ago in a video. He was talking about the fact that brands haven’t translated their ad dollars to online yet. They’re still using the traditional radio, the traditional TV, the traditional. Guess where that money’s going to go in the next five years? It’s going to go online. So it is going to get incredible competitive, and your ability to have eyeballs, your ability to gain attention, to be relevant is going to be more difficult. My book that’s coming out in May, it’s called Relevancy. And I talk in it about the fact that if we’re not relevant at the right place at the right time to the right person with the right mindset, we are dead. We get turned off. And as soon as that person turns you off, you’re off for pretty much forever.

Now, what this essentially means is that you have three marketing funnels that interconnect. So that’s number one. That is a guaranteed … There’s no way that you’re going to be profitable if you don’t have this huge, huge, huge, huge, huge project. That’s number one. Number two, you’re going to see the uprising of video in a way that you’ve never seen it before. You are going to see amazing, amazing progression with virtual reality and augmented reality. You’re going to see Facebook launch this if not the end of 2017, into 2018. Now we have an entirely new marketplace to be able to sell ads on, because let’s be honest. In quarter II report of 2016, Facebook said, “We will run out of ad space by 2017 quarter II.”

What happens when ad space runs out? Facebook’s growth is screwed. So now they’ve got to figure out ways to find new growth. How are they doing it? Well, they just demoed three, four months ago this amazing new technology that’s going to allow you to be in the same room as someone using virtual reality. So that’s coming faster than people think it’s going to come, and this is a new growth place. Back in 2003 to 2009 it was websites. Then it was online advertising. [inaudible 00:14:34] ads, and all these different types of things. The next big thing is VR and AR.

Then the next piece in the next couple of years, 2019, 2020 is going to be the rise of artificial intelligence for small business owners. You’re not going to need to run your own Facebook ads, you’re not going to need to run your … There’s going to be technology to be able to market for you as a small business. So it’s going to become easier, but more difficult because now it’s more accessible. I would say the third thing, you’re going to see small business owners having to spend money and time on awareness and audience building just like big brands have for the past 100 years.

So you are going to have to build a cult like following like Apple did, just like Nike did, just like Sony did. All these big brands spent so much time and money on awareness and audience building. Well, now you have the ability to do the exact same thing with Facebook and YouTube and Twitter and all these different types of things, assuming Twitter don’t go out of business.

So those are the three things that I see the biggest potential, but you’re going to have to move fast. You’re going to have to iterate. You’re going to have to be ready to fail forward. The reason why I’ve been able to create so much momentum in 2016, 6x our revenue, is because I’m not afraid to fail and I iterate like crazy and I break shit. I break a lot of stuff. I try to break as fast as I possibly can, because every time you break something you’re learning a lot.

So that’s where I see marketing, especially online, going. It’s going to be competitive, but it’s way easier to do it than any other time in history, but you’ve got to be relevant at the right time.

Christopher D.:                   I’m with you dude. It’s massive to actually really hear that, and I think that people don’t understand the speed and the opportunity. It’s literally a gold rush right now. It is literally right now is going to be the cheapest time ever to market on Instagram.

Scott Oldford:                      Every day that you’re not running online advertising and having your marketing funnel running, so I want you … There’s two things here. There’s one losing money and there’s one not making money. Every day that you don’t run online advertising, you are not just making money, you are literally losing money that you will never be able to get ever again. Every day that someone’s not running Facebook ads, or every day that someone’s not running a marketing funnel, every day that they’re not being able to be introduced to new people, they are losing the biggest opportunity of any … There will not … I don’t believe, okay, the last time that this happened was 1999-2002, with the website boom. [inaudible 00:17:19], and unfortunately I wasn’t old enough to be able to take care of that one, okay? I wasn’t able to utilize this one.

Well, this one I’m here, I’ve seen the past, the past is a pretty good indicator of the future. So we are seeing a time where the big brands haven’t really adopted it yet, a lot of people are still in the mode of, “Oh well, that won’t work for me,” special snowflake syndrome. And I guarantee you, you use this, you implement it, it doesn’t have to take a lot of time. I have people that come into our lead generation program, three weeks later they get a marketing funnel, they’re getting leads for $2-3 off of Facebook, and I guarantee you they aren’t anymore brilliant than anyone listening to this. Their business model isn’t any better than anyone listening to this. The only thing was they took action. Take action, get results, and then go from there.

Christopher D.:                   So they get into your program and you help them get leads off Facebook. Here’s what I hear people saying right now, “I can’t understand that.” So how easy is it for people to learn how to market on Facebook and build a marketing funnel?

Scott Oldford:                      Here’s what you need to understand. We talked about the SSF method, the sidewalk, the slow lane, the fast lane. That’s the mindset. That’s the mindset behind lead generation. Any time you sit down to write a Facebook ad, a webpage, an email, anything. You need to be thinking about who’s it going to? A lot of people just sit down and it’s like, “Okay, how do I solve this thing?” Well you have to remember 3% of people are in the fast lane. That means 97% of the other people, none of your competitors are even trying to get, because everyone’s going for the fast lane.

So there’s a couple different pieces inside an actual marketing funnel. There’s seven components. First is you’ve got to make sure that your business strategy and your math add up. I don’t know how many people actually go and start advertising on Facebook. Never did the math, which let’s be honest, majority of entrepreneurs that don’t make their million dollars plus is because they didn’t do the math ever, right?

Christopher D.:                   It’s correct.

Scott Oldford:                      It’s the most idiotic thing and I’m very happy one of my mentors that helped me, I signed him on two and a half years ago, he’s the biggest reason I’m out of debt. So that’s number one. Business strategy, math strategy. Number two is your conversion method. How are you going to take a lead and turn them into a customer? Me and you, we do that with webinars. Whether that’s a strategy call, whether that’s a big sales letter, whether that’s a seminar, doesn’t matter. But how do we take leads, turn them into customers? That’s number two.

Number three is our lead magnets and our content. Everyone’s out there talking about content marketing, at the end of the day you only need a couple core pieces of content because you are not … Most people are not in the business of being a content machine. I’m in the business of being a content machine, and besides that I’ve just got so much shit up in my head that I’ve got to get out, I don’t have a choice. I just need to get this stuff out. So the third part is lead magnets. You need to have a different type of lead magnet for the sidewalk, a quiz, a guide. For the slow lane, we’re looking at a three part video series, we’re looking at an ebook, we’re looking at an assessment. And then of course your conversion method is your fast lane.

So that’s three. We’ve got our business strategy, conversion method, lead magnet, the fourth: landing pages. Make three landing pages. I see so many people, “Why doesn’t my landing page convert?” Because you wrote it for the wrong person. Somebody that’s coming out to your quiz don’t give a shit about you, they don’t give a crap … All they want, “Oh, you know what, that’s interesting to me. That pain might be relevant to me. I didn’t really think about that before.” Versus, coming to a webinar, “All right I’m going to invest 90 minutes of my time, I better know that this is good. I better have some testimonials on the page. I better know the five top things I’m going to learn.” So different landing pages for the different mindset. Then we have the email automations. Now, again, this sounds all scary and everything else. This stuff, less than 30-40 hours to implement yourself. Not hiring anybody else. 30-40 hours to implement yourself. That’s typically what I see people implement this on.

If somebody, I see this all the time, I see these email indoctrination sequences. Email automations [inaudible 00:21:07]. First email. The person’s telling so much about themselves, listen, at the end of the day, if the person doesn’t see you as an authority, if the person’s not in the slow lane, they don’t give a shit about you. They really don’t. So we have to have different emails for the sidebar. We need to have different emails for the slow lane. We need to have different emails for the fast lane. Are we going to try to sell to somebody that doesn’t even know what the problem is? I hope to God we won’t, he’s not going to be able to sell. You just got the unsubscribe button, because that person’s like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is salesy.” Remember, when somebody sees you as being relevant and is in the fast lane, you’re not salesy, you’re giving them an opportunity.

Christopher D.:                   Got it.

Scott Oldford:                      That’s the difference.

Christopher D.:                   So it’s nearly like different levels of awareness, right? Like the slow lane to me sounds like they’re not even aware, they need to get problem aware, then they actually move up in to the fast lane when they actually know the problem, they’re looking for a solution. It’s nearly like the … You know, [Chet Holmes 00:21:57] talks about it.

Scott Oldford:                      Exactly.

Christopher D.:                   30, 30, 10 and 3, and it sounds very similar, so I love it man, and it’s such a great model. I’m going to pause you, I know you’re got so much energy and so much to share, but we’re going to have a quick break. Listeners, we’re going to just have a quick break, I want you guys to hear about an upcoming webinar that I’ve got happening. Straight after that we’re going to talk about how you can move from six figures to seven figures as quick as possible. Scott’s one of the best on the planet to help you, so Scott love you, and let’s be back just in two minutes. Go check out this webinar, I think you’ll be loving it, it’s going to be hot, and I can’t wait to see you on it.

Welcome back. I’m so glad you’re here and I’m so glad that you’re enjoying this episode with Scott. I definitely am. Scott, I’ve taken so many notes, from relevancy to what’s coming next with the VR, the AR, to really understanding the slow lane, the fast lane, and to make sure that I know where people are. So I want to ask you. I’ve seen your marketing, and one of the things that I’m so intrigued by is your seven day marketing funnel challenge. And listeners, I think you should all get on this, but Scott do you want to fill us in on exactly what that is?

Scott Oldford:                      Instead of me going and explaining the whole thing, here’s what I’m going to do for you. We’ve got the seven day online marketing challenge. We’ve got over 5,000 people going through this so far, and completed which is amazing. Not just signed up but completed. And essentially what it is, it’s going to bring you in, it’s totally evergreen, and from day one to seven it’s going to bring you through the seven components that I just started talking about.

So each day there’s a 15-20 minute video, there’s a strategy assessment, there’s a Facebook group where you get all your questions answered and that type of thing, amazing entrepreneurs in there. Then at the end, if you’re saying, “Listen, you know what? I want help implementing this, and reduce my time, increasing my momentum.” I’ll offer you a lead path or a lead generation program. If not, no big deal, I’m not going to try to pitch you if you don’t want to be pitched. I believe in my own methodology and I use my own methodology, but if you want to be able to implement an SSF method marketing funnel, that is the best way that I can show you. About 30 minutes a day, seven days, and then you’re going to be ready to be like, “You know what? Was this cool knowledge or do I want to change my reality?” Obviously I’d love for you to change your reality, but if not I respect that.

Christopher D.:                   Got it. So we’re going to put a link in the show notes, and if you guys want to go check it out go click it. christophermduncan/podcasts and you’ll see the show notes and do that. So Scott, what we really want to go through right now is we want to talk about how to go from six figures to a million. When I looked at your Facebook, that’s exactly what you wrote. I love the clarity and the simplicity. So if you click on Scott on Facebook, which is also in the show notes, you’ll see very clearly, “I help people make 100 grand scale to a million.” I love that, how does that work?

Scott Oldford:                      So number one, if you don’t have … There’s a couple missing components inside of somebody that’s below … Let’s call it 200,000. At the end of the day, pretty much anybody can get to 200,000 with just grit, hustle, and grind, and 18 hour days. Right? I get it multiple times and I’m no harder worker than anybody else and no smarter than anybody else. So I know what can be done. Now, once you get to 200,000, here’s a couple of keys. Number one, you have to have the lead generation on point. Before you do anything, before you scale, before you hire an employee, before you want to do anything, you have to get luck out of the equation. Because you are relying on luck right now. If you’re under 200,000 and you don’t have lead generation, you’re relying on luck. Don’t try to fight me on it. You’re relying on referrals, [crosstalk 00:26:20], networking. You’re literally relying on luck.

What you should really do, I like roulette, I know I’m not a huge gambler, but I was at Vegas about a month and a half ago, for the first time, which was pretty interesting. And I love roulette. And it’s the same as, if you remember 27, because I won about $12,000 on number 27 about three or four years ago, which is my fiance’s birthday. I remember, it would be amazing if you could just scratch the numbers out and then go, “Oh, 27.” So to increase your chances of being able to actually be successful.

Which is essentially what allowing … To take luck out of the equation, that’s what you do. The first thing you got to do is [inaudible 00:27:00] lead generation through the equation. Now, what does lead generation allow you to do? Well, it allows you to have a predictable flow of qualified leads. What does predictable flow of qualified leads do? Well, now you can create sustainability. Because ask yourself this hard question. If you want to wait for 60 days, would the amount of money in your bank account increase or decrease? And I am betting if you’re under a quarter of a million it would decrease instead of increase.

Now, the reason that is is because you do not have a sustainable business. You cannot hire employees successfully and go from being a reactive business to a proactive to a strategic business. Three different types of business. Majority of people under a quarter of a million are reactive. Once they get to about two million they’re proactive. Then when they get to about 10 million they’re strategic, right? You cannot get from reactive to proactive without being able to know how much money is coming into the bank account. If you are now … It’s the beginning of January 2017 while recording this. I hope you have your revenue projections done for the year. If you don’t, make sure you go and do those.

But, are you bullshitting yourself? Because the majority of people literally pull the numbers out of the hat. If you cannot be able to hire people when you know money’s in the bank account, what you’re doing is hiring when you’re on an up, when you’re on a feast, and when you go through a famine you’re going to be like, “Oh my god.” Now, what happens when you go, “Oh my god.”? Scarcity sets in. Now what happens when scarcity sets in? Now you’re starting to make short term decisions, and what happens when your short term decisions? You go against your principles, your values, and things that you said you would never do. You pick up the wrong clients. You pick up everything.

Now you get stuck in this six figure hamster wheel. You get stuck in a six figure hamster wheel, and you can never scale, you can never leverage, because at the end of the day you have the out, you have to optimize, outsource, and automate. Or the other way around. [crosstalk 00:28:59]. You have to do those three things with every piece inside your zone of genius. My zone of genius? Having a podcast like this. My zone of genius? The marketing plan overall. My zone of genius being able to get on the phone with people and within 25 minutes, then they’ll know exactly what their 2017 or their 2018 needs to look like when it comes to it. My zone of genius, strategy for the company. My zone of not genius, writing. My zone of not genius, replying to emails. Right?

So you have to take all the things out that are lower end tasks, but in order to be able to afford it you have to have sustainability, because if not you get stuck in scarcity. As soon as you get stuck in scarcity, that’s typically the companies that grow 10-20% a year, and you’re frightened shitless when December 25th comes because no one’s paying you, you’re going into the new year with no money in the bank, you can never take a vacation, and all you’re doing on Facebook is you’re making it Fakebook by showing everybody else how amazing your life is, yet you cry at night.

I don’t want that for you, because I’ve been there. I remember the day I publicly said I was $726,000 in debt. I only had 2,500 on my email list. First, I remember taking my mother off my email list. Then I went and I cried in the shower for a good hour and a half. And I came back out and it was nothing but love. It was nothing but love. And it was nothing but support. People sharing their stories.

I was like, “You know what? Maybe I’m not actually an idiot. Maybe everyone’s just as screwed up as my situation, or maybe this is a little bit different than what society makes as the reality.” I think that goes also into don’t compare yourself to anybody else. You’re yourself in the mirror. Are you 1% better better evening than you were this morning? If so, keep on going. If not, change it, and yeah. That’s the best advice I can give you. Lead generation, make sure you’re creating sustainability, work from your zone of genius, don’t get stuck in this hamster wheel because it will kill you.

Christopher D.:                   Sustainability is huge and I’ve got this saying that you actually are not in business when you’re making six figures. I get very frustrated, Scott, with-

Scott Oldford:                      [crosstalk 00:31:12].

Christopher D.:                   It is. So let’s talk a little bit about that, and here’s my take bro, is if you’re making $200,000 you can’t even hire somebody at 80 or 90,000 to actually come in and run your company for you.

Scott Oldford:                      I’ve been through this before. You’re hiring the worst of the worst. You know what I mean? At the end of the day, I mean it sounds bad, but unless you’re hiring people, like you’re poaching them from other people, you’re not hiring the greatest. But here’s the other side. People always shoot for this … This whole thing online, oh all the internet marketers talking about six figures. I was just like … Actually, I was thinking of 90 people, all beginner kind of entrepreneurs. I was like, “Who here wants to make 100,000 next year?” They’re all probably broke as shit, but everyone rises again.

Then I do a quarter million, only three people raise their hand. I look around, I’m like, “Well guys, listen, there’s a McDonald’s down the road. You can go be a manager at McDonald’s, you’ll make way more profit, you’ll work 9-5, have no stress, go home, have Netflix and chill and smoke weed, have a great life, don’t even need to worry about it.” Because if you’re going for six figures, the amount of stress going for six figures. If you’re the only one to make $100,000, you might as well do half a million because the stress is about the same. At the end of the day, you reconstruct … If you make 100,000, you might profit 20,000 if you’re lucky. When all is said and done, and I don’t know about you, but I’m in business to impact, have freedom, have fun, but there better be profit at the end of the day or I’m doing something wrong.

Christopher D.:                   Scott, I want to bring this into the conversation. I think it’s easier to build a million dollar company that it is to build a $150,000 company.

Scott Oldford:                      Easy. I don’t work anywhere as near as much as I used to. Anywhere. I actually fucking sleep for eight hours a day, eight/nine hours a night. I actually, we were talking beforehand, I just hired a personal chef and a full time personal coach to come and train me five, six times a week. For like two hours at a time. I’ve never had more time in my … Say in the last seven years at least. And it’s way easier because at the end of the day you’re like, “Okay, this is what I need to do, okay. Awesome. Erin Cameron, let’s jump on a 15 minute phone call so I can debrief you on this.” Boom, two weeks later he comes back, “Awesome. Put that out.” Everyone at the end of the day I take from the company. It didn’t particularly come from me, it was my ideas maybe, it was more from my zoned genius, but that was it.

Whereas with 100k, 150k, you’re there like, 2:00 AM in the morning being like, “Oh my god.” Right? So yeah. I think if you want to serve people better, you do that, because you can serve people better when you’re profitable, when you can have the best people, when you can afford to do things the right way and not have a shortcut. Do you have to make some shortcuts along the way when you’re starting out? Of course you do. You’ve got to make some compromises. But yeah, it’s way easier, way easier to have a couple million dollar company than a couple hundred grand, but it all comes down to this … We always talk about the scarcity and abundance mindset, but it always comes back to not only the mindset, the emotional response to abundance and scarcity.

You know Jesse [Alder 00:34:35], right?

Christopher D.:                   Yeah, I do.

Scott Oldford:                      So me and him were having this conversation, we’re doing a little event in Austin in February, and it’s specifically for coaches and consultants. And we’re talking about the fact that if you have more leads coming in the door than you have the ability to deliver, you now have an abundance of new people that want to know you and want to work with you. There’s literally no way to go into scarcity mindset at that point. Because you are literally so in demand that you can … “Hey, listen, I cost 100 grand to work with.” And people are like, “Okay, it means you’re not attached to it. We’ve got another 50 people wanting to work with you.” That’s the beautiful thing with all of this, right?

And that is not unreachable for anyone that’s listening to this right now within the next six to nine months. I need to remind you I started this current company with basically nothing May of 2015, a year and a half ago. Not that long ago.

Christopher D.:                   That’s awesome, man. I’ve got so much appreciation for everything you’re sharing, and mainly because it’s just nice for a similar message to come from another voice, and you’re such a rockstar, you’re doing some really great things. I’ve got two questions I ask every single person on this show, and everyone really loves it. In fact, my stats show that people skip forward to this moment. So if that’s you, you missed out on some really good stuff, go back and listen to the whole dang thing. But here are the questions.

The first question is this. If today you had to start over from scratch, no money, no contacts, no relationships, no social network, no email list, nothing, only what you have between your ears, how would you go about starting your business?

Scott Oldford:                      On Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, every single week, I would invite eight people for coffee and I would go around the table and I ask them three questions. The question number one would be who you are? Question number two, what is your biggest challenge? Then the question number three, based on those two questions, I would ask them a third question. I did this and I have a book about how to actually do this, Connections That Count. I actually don’t even think it’s online anymore. It’s on Amazon, but I don’t have it online anymore. That’s how I built the network I did in 2014, 2015. Without any lead generation. I should say 2013, 2014. Not 2015.

So if you’re dead broke, invite people-

Christopher D.:                   What’s the third question? You gave us two questions. What’s the third question?

Scott Oldford:                      Third question is just some random question of intimacy. What would you do … Ask them a question like you just asked me. Or number two, what’s the three things you would bring on a deserted beach? Or number three, what was your defining moment? Things that nobody asks anyone, and that gets someone’s emotional response to connect with you. And you’ve just connected seven or eight other people and now you look like a little bit of a thought leader. How much does coffee cost? Not a whole lot. I do these sometimes now, I don’t do many of them anymore, but when I used to do them everyone pretty much paid their own way and absolutely loved them. I was able to meet 7, 800 people in the span of a year doing that. [inaudible 00:37:54] but I like safe.

Christopher D.:                   I love it, dude. Here’s the second part of the question. If you were to go back to your old self, yourself back at the beginning, if you were to go back in time, and you had two minutes to give advice to the young person of Scott starting out in business and you had those two minutes right now to give him advice, what would you say? Go.

Scott Oldford:                      Kill your ego. Don’t be mentored by too many people. Don’t take the advice of too many people. Follow your gut and intuition. Fail fast. Fire fast, hire slow. Don’t over-leverage yourself both in time and money. Never buy anything. I don’t own anything. Never buy anything. Invest in experiences. Have more sex. And just be obsessed with the ROI of happiness, because the ROI of happiness majority of people try to make money to be happy, but of course the beautiful thing is is that happiness doesn’t require any money, we just believe that ourselves. I believed in that for far too long, and maybe it’s the fact that I’m on the other side now, but my happiness thankfully no longer is dependent on how much money is in the bank anymore, and it’s pretty powerful.

Christopher D.:                   What a great note to end on, brother. I appreciate you so much. Thank you for spending some time on the Freedom FastTrack Podcast. Listeners, go check out Scott on Facebook, all the links are on the show notes, but also obviously just type his name into Facebook and you can find it pretty quick.

Scott, man, I appreciate you so much. Everyone go and get that seven day challenge. I hope we can get you on the show again later in the year. I would love that, man.

Scott Oldford:                      Awesome. All right, man. Well, listen, to everybody that is listening. Thank you so much for being here and listening and having a good time, but more than anything listen less, take less advice, read less books, just go ahead and do shit, because I guarantee you, you go ahead and do shit, get those results, you implement, you’re going to make progress, you’re going to make results, you’re going to create momentum, and that’s what it really comes down to.

Christopher D.:                   You’re a badass. Like, subscribe, and share this everybody, and make sure you get this into the hands of the people that need to hear this, and we’ll catch you on the very next episode.

Hey, it’s Chris, thank you so much for listening to the Freedom FastTrack Podcast episode. You are the reason we do it. I would love to hear your feedback, I would love to hear your support. So please rate the show, please share it with your friends. It’s the only reason we do it, is to get more people living virtually free, to travel the world, make more money, have more time off, and do more of what they love.

If you want to increase your freedom, if you want to make more money, if you want to have more time doing what you love, head over to christophermduncan.com. It has free trainings, gifts, and updates on how you can be expanding your business and expanding your freedom. Again, thank you so much. Please rate and subscribe the show and head over to that site right now so you can get started on your journey to total freedom.

Christopher: What’s up freedom fast track? I’m here with a new friend but someone that I should have connected with before this. His name is Peter Scott. He’s the author of The Fearless Mindset and the creator of the Fearless Life Academy. He helps entrepreneurs conquer fear and to get out there. Dude, I’m so excited to have you here and welcome to the show.
Peter: Chris, thank you, brother. I really am excited to connect with you more on this and share a message that’s going to be valuable to your listeners.
Christopher: We’re going to talk about a lot of things out there listening to this. If you’re in your car, make sure that you get some time to watch this right to the end, but here’s where I think we’re going to go, is I think that if you’re listening to this, it’s for a reason, and that’s that you’re playing small. The only reason that we play small is that there’s some sort of fear that stops us so that’s go right into that. What is it about fear and why do entrepreneurs have so much fear about going to the next level?
Peter: I love it, okay. Number one, there may be a listener who thinks that they don’t have fear and so I want to overcome that fallacy right now because I always say there’s three types of people that are affected by fear, Chris. One is the person who knows they have fear and they’re committed to overcoming it. The second person is a person that knows that they have fear but they’re unwilling to do anything about it and the third is maybe the listener who thinks that they don’t have any fear and has no idea that’s what’s slowing them down. Because you and I know information strategy is not the problem today. We have at our fingertips unlimited access to all the strategies of how to clarify our message, to build a business, to attract clients, all those things. What stops the majority of entrepreneurs are fears and what those fears are, these irrational fears, these fears that are keeping us from living. The fear of failure, the fear of public speaking, the fear of rejection. Those are the things and the crazy thing is this. Fear camouflages and transforms at different levels that you reach in your business and in your life.
So when you’re starting out, maybe you’re afraid of losing your family’s approval, so you’re afraid to actually go out there and leave that six-figure job that you have to launch your business. Then you overcome that and then you may be afraid of losing … Maybe you’ve got a fear of success because you’ve started to taste a little bit of success and now you’re overwhelmed. You’re spread too thin. You’re exhausted. So there’s so many different ways that we could talk about this.
Christopher: There is a lot. There is a lot and so here’s what I see and what I sense. People get started, they make a little bit of money and they’re doing good and they get this first identity and I call this first identity in business the hustler and you kind of have to hustle to get things moving but I see people get stuck. It’s like they’re attached to this way of being and they’re not ready to actually shift and risk it again. I think that the biggest fear is when you’ve actually got some money, you’ve actually got things going and you need to make the next shift. I’m going to talk about a lot of things but let’s get the intro, man. Let’s dive deep. What brought you into a position where you’re now talking so much about The Fearless Mindset and the Fearless Life Academy? Where did you start and what’s your journey, man?
Peter: Yeah so the reason this is my message, Chris, is because my entire life has been consumed by fear. I’ll start and I’ll tell this very quickly. When I was 10 years old I had to sit down in a courtroom with my grandparents, an attorney and my mom and I sit across from my mom, look into her eyes and tell her that I no longer felt safe living with her because of her alcoholism. I’m 10 years old, man. As a 10 year old, I had no idea how that would impact me but what it did is it planted this [inaudible 00:04:04] belief and that belief is telling the truth meant losing love. By me telling my mom the truth, I lost her love and so I became this inauthentic version of myself that everyone loved but it wasn’t really me. Fast forward to graduating college, I’m starting a career in investment banking, making great money but I’m miserable. I hate what I’m doing but I’m afraid to leave it because my family approves of it.
And then another devastating event happened. My father suddenly passed away. He’s 60 years old, I’m 25 and he says to me on his deathbed that … I asked him why he chose to do what he did to his life because what he did is he literally gave up on life and drank himself to death and he said because he was afraid, he was afraid of not living up to his parents’ expectations. So when that happened, I’m 25 years old, I made the commitment to never let myself, a loved one or anyone I come in contact with be controlled by fear. I read books, I attended courses, I hired mentors and that’s what led me on a journey to create this movement that I’m leading now.
Christopher: Wow. Who do you work with the most at the moment?
Peter: All business owners. All business owners that have already crossed that seven-figure mark that are at that stage where the thing that’s limiting them is not lack of strategy, it’s lack of mindset and peak performance. They’re fully consumed in their business, they’re neglecting their health as a result, they’re neglecting their relationships and shifts in mindset is what they’re needing to get to that next level.
Christopher: It’s massive, man, and I love when people take their story and are so clearly able to use it to benefit others. Have you, I’m sure you have, come across The Five Regrets of the Dying?
Peter: I have, yes, absolutely.
Christopher: I was just struck by that and I quickly just pulled it up here and so listeners … There was a book, it was by an Australian nurse and … The Five Regrets of the Dying and I love this because I think this is going to be such a great episode. The first one is I wish I had courage to live true to myself, not the life others expected me. Next is I wish I hadn’t worked so hard. The next regret is I wish I had the courage to express my feelings and next is I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends and the fifth is that I wish I had let myself be happier. And it seems to me that all of those come back to fear, Peter, and I think-
Peter: They all do. They all do. That’s the biggest thing is … We as committed entrepreneurs and the person listening to this, we are so passionate about what we do. It’s our purpose in life, it’s our mission, right? And it’s funny because we had every intention to do this, not only to impact humanity but to fund our own freedom. I think that’s the purpose of business. Purpose of a business is to fund your freedom. My own personal purpose is separate from my business’ purpose. My personal purpose is to help people transform their relationship with fear but the purpose of my business is to fund that freedom, that’s my highest value. Now on my journey, I absolutely was in that stage at a hustler and I’m just getting out of that now. Working so hard, trying to push, trying to force, challenged of letting go of control. That’s a big fear that I’m facing now is learning to let go of control and delegating, trust a team around me and that’s the only thing … What I know is that, what got me here is not what’s going to get me there and same thing for the listener.
Christopher: Yes and so it’s always the same case as well, Peter, and you’ll get that one, then you’ll delegate and then the next fear will come [inaudible 00:07:21] what do I do with all this money? And that’s an interesting fear and I remember the journey. The first time was, “well, how the hell do I get out of this job and what if I don’t make the money? Oh wow, I’ve made this money, okay, how do I actually go bigger? Holy crap, I have to now trust other people. Okay, so now I have to figure out how to trust other people. Wow, now I’m trusting other people but now I’m making the money, now [inaudible 00:07:40], now I’m in the books, now I’m in the movies, I’ve got all this money. Well, what the heck do I do with it? And what if I lose it?” And it’s funny because fear does drive us as well so there are some benefits of it. But if someone’s out there listening, how do they go about actually reducing and removing the fear because some of it’s good, right?
Peter: Yes. Absolutely. There’s good fear and there’s bad fear. A mentor of mine, Jesse Elder, once said, “rational fears keep you alive, irrational fears keep you from living,” so I’m not telling you to have no fear. When I have a fearless brand, that’s my brand, I’m not suggesting being without fear. I don’t think that’s possible. I’m suggesting having the courage to do the thing that scares you that’s irrational. Number one, it’s really uncovering what is that specific irrational fear? Is it fear of rejection? Is it fear of failure? Is it fear of charging what you’re worth? A lot of aspiring or, let’s say, early stage entrepreneurs don’t have that certainty and that confidence yet to raise their rates to what they’re really worth and so there’s fears there.
One is define what that is. The second is one quick strategy that comes from my book, The Fearless Mindset, is to have a sentence stem and go through this mental exercise where you literally write down, “if I was no longer afraid of that irrational fear, if I was no longer afraid of failing, I would … .” You would what? What would you do? Who would you be? If you were no longer afraid of failing, if you were no longer afraid of public speaking or of rejection or whatever that is and then at the end of the day, very simple, is you got to do the thing that scares you. There’s no way around it, there’s no … There’s been thousands of people that have talked on the subject of fear and at the end of the day is there’s only so much pumping up you can do. You’ve got to do that thing and then know that on the other side is where that confidence and that courage is. A lot of people think they need to be courageous or be confident first. No, confidence is a result from doing the thing that scares you. It’s not a requirement.
Christopher: I love it, brother. I love the three steps. Really define what it is, if I was no longer, how would I be, how would I act and then do it. Let me add this piece for the listener as well. Something that’s really helped me is this is what’s the worst that could happen? Do you know what I love? This might sound stupid and you’re the fearless mind coach here so you can tell me whether this is good or bad advice. For me, I love looking at it from a worst case perspective and this might sound stupid-
Peter: [crosstalk 00:10:05] I love it, keep going.
Christopher: Really?
Peter: Yes, yes. Keep going.
Christopher: Okay. So in dating, if I see, when I was single, see a beautiful girl I’m like, “what’s the worst thing that could happen? Okay, she’s gonna say no and I’m gonna end up back here.” In business, what’s the worst that could happen? I’ll start a business, I’ll fail, I’ll have to get the same job. I always ask myself what’s the worst thing that will happen and if I’m okay with that then I’ll go for it.
Peter: Totally. Best question to ask is, “what if I fail?” And when you do that, just like you said, envision the worst possible scenario. Close your eyes and feel what you would feel if you felt, see what you would see, hear what you would hear, hear your family doubting, hear all those things and then realize it’s actually not that bad if that was to happen. It really isn’t. You’re still … Now here’s a better question to ask. “What if I fail and recover? What if I fail and recover from that failure?” When you start viewing at the path to recovery, if the worst case scenario happens and then you understand that there’s a way to recover from that, then you look at that failure as a unavoidable step on the path to success. That’s what failure is. My commitment personally is to fail as often and as quickly as possible and I’m not trying to mess up but I know that if I fail, that’s the marketplace giving me feedback in my business, what needs to be different in order to me to be successful?
Christopher: Beautiful, man. One of my sayings as well which adds to this, which is so good, is business is a series of microtests. That’s all I think an entrepreneurship venture is is you’re just microtesting because you’re never going to know. I love to say to people, “look, yeah, you can pay me to give you an educated guess but an educated guess is still a what?”
Peter: Yep. Totally.
Christopher: Have you done any study on this that the amount of times we actually get people to envision themselves failing then envision themselves recovering, is there anything that … Because it seems to me that’s creating a neurological link there of where they’re going to go … It’s [inaudible 00:12:11] pre-paving.
Peter: Absolutely it is. I don’t think I’ve done a study on it in terms of what the numbers is but I know that when we bring clarity to someone’s biggest fears of realizing that if that was to happen which, number one, it’s very unlikely that most of those fears come true, but if they do when they see that on the other side they’re okay and in fact when they recover from that they’re going to be better off then they’re more committed to take that action. When I work with clients of mine, a lot of them think they need to have a crystal clear vision before they take that next step in a relationship or in their business and I use the metaphor of walking through a pitch-black cave with nothing but a flashlight. You can’t see your destination. All you can see is a few feet in front of you but with every step that you take, more and more of that path gets illuminated and so you have to choose faith in those moments over fear. Faith is trust that it’s going to work out. Without having the crystal clear picture of what that path is going to be, you’ve got the end in mind and you trust yourself taking each step and if you take the wrong step, that’s okay. You can course correct.
Christopher: I love it, man. Let’s breath some life into this with some few different places where people might be. So somebody right now is listening to this, they’re in a job and they know they want to start a business. So let’s do it for them. Let’s paint their worst case and how they recover.
Peter: I love it, okay. Worst case, biggest fear of someone who’s leaving their corporate job to launch a business is that at the end of the day they’re going to fail at their venture. They’re going to lose the security of their paycheck and they’re going to have to go back and get a job again. That’s really the biggest fear. There’s all these different fears but that’s what it comes down to and then if you go deeper than that, what’s really underneath the fear of failure is actually the fear of not being enough. Because so much of our identity is wrapped up in what we do. Society tells us what success is. It’s the suits that we wear, the houses that we own, the fast sports cars that we drive. That’s not necessarily true. I’m not discounting amazing experiences like that but I’m just saying that your worth is not wrapped up in that.
So a worst case scenario of that is, at least you took a leap and risked it because what would be worse? What costs more to you, taking that risk and failing or looking back on your deathbed, realizing that you slaved away at a job that you were not passionate about but it gave you a paycheck to pay your bills and having that regret of not being able to fund freedom in your life? Literally living this one life … Whatever your beliefs are spiritually or religiously, this is all I know in this physical form right now, so why not make this the best quality of life I possibly can? I’m not going to take a job where I spend most of my waking hours hating what I’m doing just to pay the bills. That costs more-
Christopher: I love it.
Peter: That’s more painful than failing if you actually take the leap.
Christopher: When you make the fear of regret bigger than the fear of failing then you’re going to take action every single time. Let me ask you this, Peter. Can you remember a time that you set a big goal? [inaudible 00:15:35] Can you just think of a time in your life you set a really big goal?
Peter: Yeah absolutely.
Christopher: Now let me ask you this. Did you hit the goal or not? Most times people don’t, right? So I’m just going to pre-frame this a little bit. Let me ask you this next question. Even though you didn’t hit the exact goal that you want, what other good things turned up because you’d been on that path? Was it pretty substantial?
Peter: Yes, I’ll share a story if that’s what you’re looking for on this.
Christopher: Do it.
Peter: Last year I published my book, The Fearless Mindset. It was a huge goal of mine to become a published author, not just publish a book but have a really well-written book that’s successful, that’s sold to thousands of people. That was my goal. What I wanted underneath that, which I didn’t realize, was the approval of my family in doing something significant. And what happened was, I didn’t reach my goal and it was heartbreaking. Why? Because what happened was, while writing that book, a family member of mine who I loved dearly said that if I was to publish it, because I get very raw and vulnerable about my family story in there, if I was to publish it then I was ruining the family name and she would disown me. This seriously happened.
Christopher: Wow.
Peter: This was actually at a family reunion. We’re sitting at the dinner table. I’m declaring to my family how proud I am of launching my business, this was a couple of years ago, of publishing a book and literally everyone’s like, “you’re not doing the right thing. Who are you to be doing this? You don’t have the certifications [inaudible 00:17:11],” all these things, right?
Christopher: Wow.
Peter: My heart sank in that moment so I had a choice to make. Do I throw away the book that I was so committed to doing to make my family feel comfortable or do I risk losing my family’s approval to actually have an impact on humanity? And I chose the latter and now my family is so proud of me, now they’re so amazed that I went through with that but I had that moment and every single listener here is going to have that shift where it’s like, you can choose to sacrifice in a way where you’re making your family, your friends, your co-workers, your employees, whatever it is, comfortable or you can pursue and follow through on this vision no matter what and actually experience the result of that. I think that answers your question of setting a goal, missing it and then actually achieving more than what that goal initially was.
Christopher: Every single time I ask that question, Peter, here’s what happens. 90% of the time we don’t hit what we set out to hit but that doesn’t fricking matter. The point of action? Other things turn up. Here’s what the universe says. Universe goes, “you know what, I’ve got something better for you. You said you were going after that thing. Yeah, that’s great, move,” and as soon as you move the universe goes, “I’m gonna reward your movement by so much.” And I see this happen, dude, and I’ve helped multiple people make millions and millions and millions of bucks and every time at the beginning of the year we set this big goal and I always have this smile and [inaudible 00:18:42] I go, “it doesn’t matter if we hit that or not.” We set the big goal, we do everything to hit it. Other stuff shows up and this is this crazy externality that we never can plan for and that we never know but if we never took that leap, that fear holds us, then we never get it, man. And it’s just like [inaudible 00:19:00].
Peter: I love it.
Christopher: It happens every single time so let’s shift to the next person. Let’s shift to the next person. This is the first person fearful to start their business so the next person has started their business, they’re full-time but they’re really fearful of really going out there in a big way.
Peter: Okay.
Christopher: What’s the worst case that’s going to happen to them?
Peter: So the worst [crosstalk 00:19:23] So the worst case … So if the fear is actually afraid of going out there in a big way then there’s some underlying fear of judgment there or of rejection, of getting feedback from people not agreeing with you and especially with people that are speakers, authors, coaches, they really face this because they’re very vulnerable. They’re out there, they’re sharing their message, they’re doing these things directly with people across online, on social media, things like that. So what the worst thing that could happen is that you’re going to get haters. In fact, actually the thing that’s guaranteed that’s going to happen is you will get haters because if you’re sharing a message and you’re not getting haters then you’re simply being too vanilla and no one’s even noticing that you exist. So if you’re doing something that’s going to upset or make a few people uncomfortable or people are going to disagree with then good for you because that means you’re going to have a tribe of raving fans that absolutely will follow you to the end of the earth and that way you can actually have a bigger impact.
Christopher: Badass, man. Haters are just jealous supporters, man. They just help get your message out there even more.
Peter: I have never heard that. I love that. I love that.
Christopher: We’re going to take a quick break listeners and when we come back after the break we’re going to talk about the person who’s actually got themself out there and they’re looking to build a team and then the person that’s made the money and I’m going to talk about fear at every single level, Peter, because I love this, man, and we’ve covered so much ground so have a quick break, take a glass of water, get out your pen and paper because when we come back, we’re just going to go down into more gold nuggets. See you in a couple of minutes.
Welcome back to the show guys. I’m still here with Peter. We’ve been sitting here chatting off-air for a moment and he’s got an amazing gift he’s going to give you in a little while but before we go there let’s just continue on this vein because it feels to me like a vein of gold. It really does so let’s talk about the next person, Peter. This person, they have started their business, they have got their voice out there and now they’re running out of time and they need to hire a team. What is the worst case for these people and what is their fear?
Peter: Biggest fear is a fear of letting go of control. This in fact is actually something that I’m working through right now. I’m actually experiencing this right now because when you’re starting out you’re taught whatever needs to be done, you’re going to roll up your sleeves, you’re going to hustle and you’re going to get it done. Why? Because you don’t have the resources at that stage to delegate. When you’re at this stage, Chris, that you just said, you’ve got the money. One of my favorite quotes comes from a man named Dan Sullivan from Strategic Coach and he goes, “if you have the money to solve a problem, you don’t have a problem.” So true. How many people are like, “I-I-I don’t have the, the, the, the freedom I have to spend on … ?” Well if you’re doing everything yourself then you don’t have a problem because you can actually delegate and pay for somebody to do that so the fear is letting go of control. The way to overcome that is to have faith in really getting clear on the process of attracting the highest level of talent that you possibly can be and then give them the freedom to actually do the work and take responsibility. I’ve seen so many entrepreneurs start building their team out and micromanaging their team to not actually do … And they’re actually working more as a result of this. It’s getting clear on-
Christopher: So what’s the worst case?
Peter: So worst, okay so-
Christopher: [inaudible 00:23:53]
Peter: Yeah. So worst case is that you hire someone, they don’t do a good job after a month or three months and you have to let them go. There’s an opportunity cost of a couple of months and whatever you paid them. But the best thing about that is you have to go through that. Just like failure, you have to go through that to find the right person. That’s the worst case scenario which any one of us at this stage can recover from.
Christopher: Just [inaudible 00:24:22] right back where you want to … Here’s something listeners that I always say at this point is you either spend your time or you spend your money but nothing is ever free. You either spend your time or your money but nothing is ever free. So that’s the worst case that could happen unless they let go of control but do you know what? It could actually be worse than that. Here’s what could be even worse. They could rip you off. That’s even worse. That’s the complete worst so how do you recover? They can come into your business, you can teach them some stuff then they can rip you off, this has happened to me, and then they’re out there doing what you would do or something. They’re taking your inner workings of your business. So then how do we recover?
Peter: Number one, I know that no one’s going to do something as good as I can do and in the way that I do it, right? I know that so if I was training somebody and he was going to take my information and go and share that and package it himself, it’s not going to be done in the same way as myself so honestly, Chris, that could happen and it doesn’t seem like the end of the world to me at all. Because I’m so confident and certain in my own abilities that I know that no one … Copy me all you want because what you’ll be viewed as is a copycat of me, right? So I’m okay with that. That’s why [inaudible 00:25:42] on that.
Christopher: Right on, man. Right on. So then the last move, I think, the last fear is … Okay, so I’ve got it all and now I might lose it. The fear of now I’ve got the team, I’ve got the business, I’ve got the money, look at my bank account, look at the difference I’m making. What if I lose it? That’s the biggest fear.
Peter: At that stage, I always say the fastest way to lose anything is to live in the fear of its loss and when you are feeling the fear of losing money or you’re feeling the fear of losing love … Think of how many relationships have ended because somebody is becoming clingy or needy or attached because of their fear of losing that love and they’re actually driving that love away. What I would suggest doing in that moment is, number one, get really connected to the journey that you’ve taken to get to where you are because there’s so much to be grateful for … so much to be grateful for in what you’ve created and then, two, trust that if you do lose it all … Let’s talk about worst case scenario. If you did lose that but you already achieved all that, you have not only the ability but now the knowledge of however many years it took to do that. You can recreate that even better in less time. That’s the way that I honestly look at that.
Christopher: True that. True that. Dude this has been awesome.
Peter: I’m loving it, this is good.
Christopher: I’ve got a couple [inaudible 00:27:11] questions.
Peter: Okay.
Christopher: I think that every single listener would have found something that they can really take from everything we’ve gone through and that’s what’s important to me. I’ve got two questions I ask every single time and here’s the first one. If you would go back to when it started for you, your entrepreneurial journey, and you got to spend just five minutes with your old self, what advice … What would you tell that old version of you?
Peter: Stay true to your path. I would say stay true to your path because I look back where I started and it was so easy for me to compare myself to others that were in the game of entrepreneurship five, ten, twenty years longer than I have and noticing that gap and that gap would create stress, it would create frustration, it would create all these different things. If I really just appreciated the journey of every single step, I know that I would’ve not only achieved as much if not more than what I’ve achieved but I would’ve enjoyed every single moment. This is something I recommend myself now at this stage as well as when I started.
Christopher: I love it, dude. The second part to the question is this. Say today, you had to start from scratch. No relationships, no connections, no following, no email list, no money. Only thing that you have is your mindset. You’re in a completely new environment, no one knows you, you just have your experiences and you have your thinking. How do you start your business?
Peter: Good question. The first thing that came to mind was to find a group of people that represent a younger version of myself, not just in age but in life experience. So if I find a group of people that are in a stage in business or in their life where I once was. Let’s say, where I was three years ago. Find them and then commit 100% to serving them because I know what problems they’re facing, I know what fears that they have, I know all these things that are … Because I was them not too long ago and since I’ve got that knowledge, I don’t need the financial resources and the relationships to start growing. I can go serve immediately.
Now side by side that process, I go find the influencers of the world who I need to start connecting with and serve them in a valuable way because by creating value for them, over time they’re going to want to introduce me to influencers or to groups that they lead if that makes sense and that’s how I’d reverse engineer that process and the biggest thing … Honestly, Chris, what I really want the listener to take away is get it really clear on the results that you’re wanting and find somebody who has those results and has helped others create those results. I would not be where I am without the mentors that I’ve had, without the masterminds that I’ve been a part of. It’s the hundreds of thousands of dollars and the time that I invested that has shortened the learning curve because could you do it on your own? Absolutely. But why take 10 years when you can do something in one year, right?
Christopher: It’s the biggest thing, like a smart man learns from his own mistakes, wise person learns from the mistakes of others and getting that and getting clear on that is huge and you would think … And this really segues into your gift. You’ve got an amazing gift and you were telling me about it before. It’s a five day face your fear challenge where they get an online training and you’re gifting this away to everyone listening today. You want to fill us in a little bit on the five day face your fear challenge?
Peter: Sure, yeah. Since my passion is helping entrepreneurs conquer fear and I know that’s the one thing that’s limiting them, I created a free virtual five day face your fear challenge. What your listener gets is, they get a daily video from me. It’s absolutely free and that video is short. It’s less than five minutes. But it challenges them to conquer one specific fear in their life whether it’s rejection, judgment, charging what you’re worth and I just really am passionate about what your message is, Chris, and your audience and I wanted to gift that away so if the listener wants to get that they can go to challengeyourfear.com and get it absolutely free.
Christopher: That’s awesome and that’ll be in the show notes, listeners, and in the email that you received about the show as well so you’ll be able to just click on that link and head on over and so let’s not just face your fears, let’s forget about them and move forward and I think that’s what’s going to happen in that five day … Brother, we’ve covered so much. We went into, step by step, the different fears, fear of judgment, fear of letting go, fear of getting started, fear of … I’ve got notes. If you’re listening to this and you can hear a page rattling, that’s because I’ve been sitting here taking notes listening to this. I really love the three steps that you dropped down. Define what the fear is, talk about how if it was no longer, how would I be and then do the thing that scares you and we had some good chats on that, man, and I was just excited to have you on. We do need to say goodbye but before then I would love you to just connect with what is the last message or the last thing that you would love to leave with our audience and our listeners today?
Peter: The last thing I would say is … The biggest take away I want you to have is that being fearless is not being without fear. That’s not possible. It’s not something that’s healthy. Being fearless is having the courage, the confidence, the commitment and really the faith of doing the thing that scares you. As long as you know you’ve got a fear there, then commit to ruthlessly do that thing over and over and over again and your life will just level up beyond your wildest dreams. That’s what I would like to leave with.
Christopher: I appreciate that, brother. Listeners, you might want to listen to this again and I love that it’s being fearless, less fear. I would love everyone listening to transmute the fear of action, the fear of success and the fear of failure into the fear of regret because when the fear of regret is there then you’re going to take action and right now, as you listen to this, it’s the youngest you’re ever going to be. Peter, my guest today, thank you so much for being on the show, man. You’ve no idea how much I appreciate it.
Peter: Thank you, brother.
Christopher: It’s awesome so thank you so much. Listeners, live with total freedom. Free your mind, free your time, free your life so you can do more of what matters most. Like, subscribe and share this episode. Remember to leave us a comment and go and check Peter out. You’ll see all the show notes at christophermduncan/podcast and have an amazing day. We’ll see you on the next episode. Smash it.

Christopher D.:                   Welcome to the Freedom Fast-Track Podcast. My name is Christopher Duncan and I’m here with a new friend someone I’m really looking forward to getting to know. Dr. Dave is the founder or the creator of Integrated Sport and Spine and we’re going to be talking about lots of things. David, it’s really great to have you here and here’s why. For me, health wellness is foundation for being successful as an entrepreneur. Me and you were talking about you are a physiologist so first, I just want to say welcome to the show.

Dr. David:                               Thanks for having me.

Christopher D.:                   Alex Charfen connected us; He’s the only person that I’ve had on the show three times. One thing that we share in common is this idea of entrepreneurs are going to change the world, an entrepreneur needs to be in momentum and actually move forward. We talked a little bit off the air and so I just want to put some context on for listeners. We’re going to talk about stress. We’re going to talk about your transition from being a chiropractor. You’re a chiropractor aren’t you?

Dr. David:                               Yeah, correct, sort of.

Christopher D.:                   I thought for a moment there, I’m like did I just make that up?

Dr. David:                               No. I’m a little bit of everything. Chiropractor is my main degree, yes.

Christopher D.:                   Got it. I’m really looking forward to learning more about you. We’re going to be showing and talking about how you help chiropractors. I guess it’s going to apply to lots of service-based business owners actually transition to online. We’re going to talk about stress. It’s going to be a wild ride but let’s start where we should start, which is let’s get a good introduction to you, where it all started and kind of where you are now. If you do us that favor, that’d be awesome.

Dr. David:                               Yeah, perfect. The purpose of this podcast is going to be short and quick. The brief aspect of things is that I’ve had a passion. Believe it or not, I wanted to be an NFL player in third grade. Most people kind of giggle and chuckle. I also wanted to be a doctor so my parents said, “Cool, whatever path you want to take.” Well the reality is by sixth grade I had built a gym in my basement and had all the neighborhood kids over in my basement working out by sixth grade.

This has literally been the health and wellness aspect of things has been through and through who I’ve been labeled as ever since a little kid. We talk about passion all the time. I’m sure you touch on this all the time of finding your passion and creating products around it and those sorts of things. This was my go-to. Unfortunately massive education actually can get you out that so my path of education, double major in biochemistry and molecular biology, I am a chiropractor. I also have a master’s degree in sports science and rehabilitation. I’m certified clinical exercise physiologist and strength and conditioning coach. I have a lot of stuff behind my name and all of that educated me to actually almost not give out all of my passion because at the end of the day, they teach you as a provider to peg yourself into whatever provider realm you are and that’s the only information you give out.

So, when I discovered the online world, I started drooling as this way to say, “Wow, I can start to get my information out” and currently I mostly help providers figure out that balance of getting out into the online space and really provide value for their patients. At the same time, create more freedom for their practice so that they don’t get burnt out.

Christopher D.:                   It’s a big thing. I started out as a personal trainer. I started out in the health niche and I share very similar dreams and aspirations to you as well. My number one growing up was I was going to be an NBA basketball player and I’d represent my country but I didn’t like it. Further than that, here’s where I find is so interesting … Is that translation to that sports mindset into businesses is actually huge. I really see the entrepreneurs that have taken off are the ones that are treating their bodies -pro athletes and getting –

Dr. David:                               It wasn’t a conversation for the longest time and that’s a really sad thing. When I graduated school it was, here’s your traditional business model and no help. Just go figure this out. Really no one talked about me taking care of myself as the best way to actually build my business and show and represent what I actually know.

Christopher D.:                   It feels like the world is waking up. It’s definitely a different world than when I started the business 12 years ago now. We talked off the air about the two different paths that we’re going to take on this interview because a man like you that’s got so much knowledge in so many things, we’ve got half an hour so I’ve got to make sure we try to use it to our best advantage.

I wanted to first off ask and have you speak to the service to health service provider or really any service provider, and how? Because you obviously coach chiropractics so chiropractors, if you’re listening, this is going to be huge. I want to go a little bit wider and I want to talk to people who do have a service and they’re transitioning online and would love to understand some of the big mistakes that they make and some of the things that aren’t working with people.

Dr. David:                               Well, they’re one and the same in the fact that when we start a business, we tend to already be in a different mindset, right? So, we can say that people who start their own business already are wired slightly different. They care more about things. They have a different physiology about them. Whether you’re a service provider or not, you get into this model of [inaudible 00:06:16] you’re trying to get out there and do the best that you can to make the living and that fun saying “I’d rather work 80 hours than 40 hours” kind of thing. [crosstalk 00:06:26]

Terrible, same. That’s really where the end of the conversation always happens, that we don’t talk about the stress that comes from that. Inherent, a natural thing that happens to people who start their own business, without them knowing. It’s just like back pain that suddenly comes on. The reality is that if its building for ten years, their back was bad and they’d go to bend over and pick up a paperclip and their back snaps and they wonder why. Same thing with stress and entrepreneurship. People who are aspiring to change their life, where they’re getting out of that job and starting to create their on online thing. Or whether you’re a provider and you’re sick of just showing up day and day, treating the same patients day in and day out and you’re looking for a way to do better business and create more value for your patients. The stress level keeps rising up, no matter what. We can all relate to the same thing.

Christopher D.:                   It’s huge. It’s really interesting and I had to write it down. You probably heard me drop something, I was getting a pen. Here’s what I really want you to expand on: You said people that start a business are wired differently, physiologically. I was like, “Holy moly, what do you mean by that?” What is that?

Dr. David:                               Brain connectivity problems. We obviously are all familiar with genetics and what makes us who we are. There’s also this thing called epigenetics, which is actually the expression of our genes. This can change over time, this can change when we’re being brought up and raised. People who are around entrepreneurship when they’re younger, are more likely to turn into entrepreneurs when they’re younger. We tend to follow things, based off of that and our genetics make us who we are.

Now certain chemical profiles … This is a cool thing. This is why I actually latched onto Alex Charfen in the beginning, is that the EPT mindset … In my world, we can sometimes call that “processing disorder”, where we get a whole bunch of flood of chemicals in our brain, where it’s the ADHD. We daydream, we do all of those sorts of things that most people say in school is bad, but when we hit the real world, can be good. It’s that risk-taking ability, that ability to step out and do something against the norm. Those people are wired differently, from a chemical standpoint and a neurology standpoint, to make them take that risk.

Christopher D.:                   Its such a big focus of mine to understand this at the [inaudible 00:09:10], you have no idea. Do you know who Joe Dispenza is? Joe Dispenza?

Dr. David:                               Yeah, I think so.

Christopher D.:                   He’s amazing, he was a chiropractor. I think that’s how he’s got his doctor in front of his name. I was watching a movie just recently, about it … Is it epigenetics?

Dr. David:                               Epigenetics, yep.

Christopher D.:                   Right. It was fascinating to me, in the fact that what stress is doing to our body but also, he talks about it in detail in a book, which is ‘Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself’. It’s a fricken amazing book, man. I’m about to read it a second time. He talks about [inaudible 00:09:50] and I feel like I’m talking to someone who knows this way better than I am. This was my understanding of it was that we have these [inaudible 00:09:55] so used to certain chemicals in our body and they are released by certain emotional states that we have.

For example, emotional states like scarcity. When they stop living in scarcity so those chemicals aren’t there anymore so these receptor sites say, “Hey, why is that chemical not there anymore?” It sends a signal up to the brain and says “This is crazy, we don’t have these same chemicals” and the brain starts freaking out and they get themselves back in scarcity mode again. Then the body goes “Ahhh”-

Dr. David:                               Let’s put this in relation to stress because this is exactly what stress does to us is that –

Christopher D.:                   Awesome!

Dr. David:                               Yeah, the long-term effects of stress is that … Like I said, we don’t really realize we have stress at first. We label stress wrong. I’m going to screw with this is that when we label stress as a mental health problem or when you’re over-stressed you should be less stressed. Those statements, what they’re actually talking about is the end result of a symptom, not the actual problem. When we relabel stress as a physiological aspect, a chemical process, then we can start to have a better conversation around when we first start a business; If we’re not performing at our best and taking care of our physiology, then we never get to the over stressed spot when we talk about it from a mental health aspect. That burn-out phase … That almost all entrepreneurs have to deal with.

If we reroute the conversation around that physiology aspect, then we can actually take action steps to change our physiology. When we think about it from a mental health standpoint, we think of overwhelm and almost no one does anything about mental health problems. They just say, “That’s just the way it is”, “They’re an anxious person”, “They’re a depressed person”, “Here is some medication”. The reality is that if we talk about it from a physiology standpoint, we can take very simple steps, on a daily basis, to control the physiology and never get to that stressed out spot.

Christopher D.:                   I would love to know, what are some of these daily steps that we could take?

Dr. David:                               Yeah, yeah, exactly! If we want to get into that right away, we can. I think it would –

Christopher D.:                   Let’s not, I’m floored with this so much that … You obviously hear me talk a lot about tactics. We hit marketing on here a bit, but we talk about mindset a lot as well. Honestly, if you’re not moving in your body the right way … Those of you watched this on YouTube, I’m at my stand-up desk and there’s a reason why I’m pretty sure that Dave is too and this is part of that.

Dr. David:                               Yeah.

Christopher D.:                   So are you on a trampoline?

Dr. David:                               No, I’m just barefoot and I like to spring around a lot. I have a whole bunch of foot stuff underneath me.

Christopher D.:                   Nice. Let’s dive straight into some of the steps. I think we were going to do it at the end but –

Dr. David:                               Yeah, let’s do it right away because I want to give things practical for people to actually follow. The more information … Here’s the problem with bio hacking right now. Everyone has something to sell towards bio hacking, which is actually a great thing. However, people are forgetting that there is a basis that we need to be alive. That there is this underlying concept of health of, just the basics and it sounds way too easy, therefore people dismiss it. It’s gotta be something, I gotta have this new product in order to Tenex my business. They’re looking for an app, they’re looking for a product or service that they can buy when the reality is the best Tenex for their business is to take care of themselves first.

Here’s a couple of the steps. Maybe I’m biased, I don’t know. Walking and water are the two biggest steps first. Water, being the most critical. I’ve got a little story about this. Being a provider for so long, I used to just simply ask people, “Are you drinking enough water?” Of course, 99% of people say “yes”. Then you ask a few more questions and find out that maybe 2% of the population actually drinks enough water, they just think they drink enough water. It was always hard, as a provider, to be able to say to someone … My normal protocol was, “I want you to drink enough water to make your eyeballs feel like they’re floating.”

That would stimulate some sort of conversation but it wasn’t until I came across Alex’s “Get Thirsty Now” program, where it actually regimented the water and I was like, “Oh my gosh, that makes so much sense!” Have someone follow a program when they drink water, to the timeframe because we’re so much creatures of habit. It’s almost like a challenge aspect to prove to them how dehydrated they are. That “Get Thirsty Now” program that he has, we can put a link at the end of this, is by far one of the best programs I’ve actually come across. I actually implemented that into my practice right away, when I’d come across that. And saw phenomenal results.

Getting enough water is the basis. No matter what bio hacking you do and no matter what other exercise you do, if you’re dehydrated, you’re not putting your body in the prime state to actually heal, recover and balance everything out. The walking aspect is the other big misnomer because we’ve been marketed to that running is the best thing for us. It’s a crazy correlation that I would say, if you have a high-level entrepreneur, a vast majority of them will do triathlons. It’s really big, especially in our area. Every business owner is in a triathlon here and they’re doing Ironman; Because they’ve been marketed to that’s the healthy thing for an entrepreneur to do. Go out and work out for eight hours straight, when the reality is they’re creating a stress level, right? Because exercise is stress, work is stress, family is stress. All they’re doing is increasing all of those cortisol levels, those bad stress hormones and continually keeping them up. They’re never actually bringing them back down.

That’s where walking comes in. If those entrepreneurs were to flip over and just walk for 20 minutes, they would actually see more weight loss, they would see their stress reduced, they would see their happiness go up. Most importantly … And this is at the end of the conversation on why we care about stress, is that cortisol actually makes our brain shrink. When we have high levels of stress, aka cortisol, we actually lose neuro connections in our brain for the decision-making process, the ability to have social interactions, our memory and our learning, our concentration. All of those synapses in our brain actually start to literally shrink and go away when inflammation and cortisol take over.

Water and walking are the two pillars that we start to get into. Then getting into nutrition and movement are two other pillars that I talk about. You have to have that water and walking first. If you’re going to start with anything and that’s all you think you can fit in, from a time standpoint … 20 minutes, I know that’s a lot of time. Getting that in, on a daily basis, is going to have a revolutionary effect on your body, performance, your ability to run your business. Especially for the people that are doing their business, or I should say, at work all day. They’re trying to start this online thing and they’re trying to get into the next phase of their life of starting their own business. I know I’ve been there because I was treating patients all day and staying up until 11 o’clock at night, trying to start this online thing. If I didn’t have water and I wasn’t taking care of myself, if I wasn’t going out for walks at lunch, there’s no way I could stay up past 7, 8 o’clock because I was so exhausted. Therefore, you’re not successful.

Starting with those two and then the other big thing that I’m a huge fan on is movement and fat. Fat from a nutrition standpoint of, I like to challenge people in the same way as the water. For ten days, I say to get a liter of olive oil out, like one to two packs of butter and a jug of coconut oil and you need to go though those in ten days. You just start eating it with every meal, especially right before bed. That gives you the brain-healing processing aspect that it heals those neurons in there and starts to revive your capacity to make decisions and actually think clearly.

And then movement, you and I are standing at the standing desk. Any one thing that you’re doing for an extended period of time is bad for our bodies. Whether you’re standing or sitting, it can be just as detrimental. Standing at a desk allows you to squat, move around and shift. Unfortunately, a lot of people stand still on one leg when they stand at a standing desk. So, you gotta get some squats in there and you gotta move on a regular basis, giving your joints a full range of motion. Those are the practical steps to get going.

Christopher D.:                   It’s so important. I’ve been following the ketone diet and high fats for a long time. Dave Aspery is a good friend and a massive inspiration and it seems to me that everyone is looking for something new and big because the simple, basic things … Just the simple and basic couldn’t possibly be that. I love what you’re talking about and I would love to just help the listeners really, really get a niche of motivation so there’s …

You know my story, listeners. You know where I came from, where I am. Here’s I do every morning. Every morning, the first thing I do is, I wake up in gratitude, I drink a liter of water with a green drink in it. And then I walk, I come back, I have my high-fat keto drink, I sit down and meditate, and I do it absolutely. I added deep breaths, I move, I stand and sit, stand and sit all day. I didn’t do this for a period of time but when I brought back that morning and these things, it was more important to me than anything else; Because one thing that I say and you say this too, I see so many people wake up in the morning and rip their muscles to shreds trying to build this big body. I see them having this … I know how much body builders have to sleep. I used to work in the gym, I’ve watched them sleep and sleep and sleep.

Dr. David:                               Yeah.

Christopher D.:                   And they both had the high levels of focus. And then they’d put so much caffeine into their body, that they’re going up and down, up and down, up and down and there’s no flat-lining so –

Dr. David:                               The adrenaline loop.

Christopher D.:                   Oh my gosh, we could just talk forever on this but let’s have a pause. We’re gonna have a slight break. I’ve got an amazing webinar coming out and I want you to hear about it. I’ll be right back with Dr. Dave, straight after the break.

Christopher D.:                   Hey, welcome back. I hope that if you wanted to join that webinar, that you clicked over and you got into it. It really is going to be so much potential and we’ll be having fun. I just want to rephrase you back to where we were because when we’re talking about stress, when we’re talking about the basics, when we’re talking about physiology … We want to continue on this path for a little bit longer Dave, like in the break, you and I were just talking. We were talking about how the quota is always decreasing the brain size and adrenals and hormones.

Let’s just go there, let’s just go into adrenal loops and hormones and I’d love for you to just go and tell us, why is it so important for people to know about that and what is it that you do?

Dr. David:                               Fine, twist my arm, I’ll get a little bit deeper. It’s one of those aspects, where like I said, most people have talked about stress from a mental health aspect in the past. If we refrain that from a physiological standpoint, the wooly mammoth is in front of us, as a business owner. We have constant stress onto us and some people handle that a little bit better, some people are a little more anxious.

I also make the argument, and this is a whole other side tangent I like to get onto is negative news media. If we’re watching the news, there’s tons of research that shows that you can easily be on a negative mindset for eight to nine hours from just watching just 3 minutes of news.

So, just getting our mindset right toward physiology … Of attacking that, in order to be the best human being that we are. If we don’t, if we don’t breathe, if we don’t walk, if we don’t get the water, we get these higher levels of cortisol. I know you can’t see me right now in my lower half, I have a “cortisol baby”, I call it … Where I am in extremely great shape. I can go out and I can do all sorts of things. But I have a stress baby in my stomach. That’s that fat tire around the waist and that comes from this hormone and chemical called cortisol, which leads to a whole bunch of inflammation.

Inflammation is, thankfully now, a term that has bene flying around the news media and those sorts of things as something we need to attack but the underlying root issue is actually the cortisol. Controlling that adrenal loop when we get excited, we get a shot of adrenaline, cortisol starts to rise and then it stays up there. Then our flammatory markers start to become very present and this is where fatigue sets in. This is why endurance athletes can be bad, this is why body building can be bad, as an entrepreneur; Because we’re over-stressing, over-fatiguing our body and not clearing out inflammation and not clearing out cortisol and that leads to long-term damage in our body. Not being able to sleep, not being able to do the things we want to do.

So it’s this vicious loop that we do to ourselves. The reality is, is that once we recognize this, we shouldn’t be the person going out in extreme workout. We have to have this balance as an entrepreneur, as someone who is trying to do a lot. You don’t add in extreme stuff on top of that. You don’t add in extreme diets and working out.

Christopher D.:                   Wow, what an eye-opener.

Dr. David:                               Yep.

Christopher D.:                   I’m only just starting to really realize the impact that caffeine and coffee can have on this and these things –

Dr. David:                               And here’s a great conversation with that is that fatigue usually happens from dehydration. What do we do? The first thing we do is grab a cup of coffee. We don’t have fat, we don’t have things to balance out the coffee. And so we get this nice little high from the caffeine or sugar, a lot of people do both, then we crash.

Quite literally, I’ve come across entrepreneurs and people that I’ve helped, where we’re not talking two to three cups of coffee in a day … We’re talking two to three pots of coffee in a day. They wonder why three months, they go on this long bender, that their body is crashing, their joints are sore, they can’t sleep at night, they have all these problems downstream. That comes from dehydration, the simple aspect of water.

Christopher D.:                   Wow. Now you have got a lot of this information on your new website. Where do people go to, to get … You’ve got checklists and all the downloads that they can get. Where do they go to get all that?

Dr. David:                               I have, through my personal clinic, Integrated Sport and Spine. It’s just called www.issmadison.com. If you’re a provider, I want to encourage you on the Facebook group to the cash-based lifestyle practice. I go much more into detail on this because providers are at a much deeper level of understanding of the need to take care of themselves. Creating value for their patients and being able to step out of the office to take care of themselves in order to better take care of their patients. So the Facebook group Cash-Based Lifestyle Practice.

Christopher D.:                   I love it. That’s where we’re going to head to next in this conversation. You’re being very successful in moving out of the practice and into online and you told me [inaudible 00:27:06] into practice at all so fill us in on that part of your journey. That’s really –

Dr. David:                               I had some really cool experiences of … Like I said, I was the traditional business mindset. When I graduated chiropractic school, I had big dreams of building a huge integrated practice. It came time at one point where I had a government contract to treat a hospital system so I was going to be in charge of 25,000 patients on top of my normal sports medicine practice that I already had.

So I got out into this big office space, 6,500 square feet. My goal was to get four providers there, have a couple of medical doctors, a couple of chiropractors, acupuncture, yoga. What it ended up being was a triathlon coaching facility. We had indoor training, indoor cycling, we had a cross-fit gym type of feel to it. We had a couple of providers. It didn’t get quite as big enough and so I couldn’t cover the overhead as much. Then the government dropped the contract.

Suddenly, I found myself like … A massive chunk of money, gone. Just in one cut? I found myself scrambling to say, “Now what am I going to do?” So, we ended up downsizing and then I really had to self-mantra. I’m in control of my own destiny. I had to literally keep telling me that, myself that. I was burnt out. I was working from 6:30 in the morning until midnight every night, I’m doing stuff. I was searching for things online to try to say, how can I better my practice? I was going through like, business development and I came across the fact that I can sell my information on line. That’s an interesting concept.

For about a year, I just sat back and watched people. I was that stalker online, I started following people like yourself, very successful, great ideas. I started looking at different aspects of it and started thinking, “I think this is the route for me.” This is my way out.

I downsized the practice, actually dropped all of insurance, which is what the Cash-Based Lifestyle is all about … Is getting the shackles torn off, so that as a provider, you can do what you want without the constraints of the patient thinking that, “Is insurance going to pay for this or not?” And just having them pay cash for the value that you’re providing. I did this all at the same time, so –

Christopher D.:                   Wow.

Dr. David:                               Yeah, it was really cool. You wanna talk about … Quite literally, the next day after I decided to go cash, I just said, “Okay, here’s my thirty-day notice.” I sent out letters, emails, I said “screw you” insurance companies, I’m leaving you. All of those sorts of things at once and I was able to take a deep breath. I was able to sleep that night so well –

Christopher D.:                   Wow.

Dr. David:                               Because I understood, from that point moving forward, that I was in control of my own destiny. That I didn’t have to follow traditional business principles in order to be successful. So now I’m at the point where I’m helping coach chiropractors and making online products. I’m creating reoccurring revenue for our office, which is like nutrition programs, condition-based aspects.

You come in, you have low back pain. Well, here’s your program. It’s a downloadable PDF for you and I have YouTube channels and all that kind of fun stuff for the videos. In all of that systematization, the ability to be online to do that, as a provider, in your practice is just so stress-relieving. It makes you feel good.

Christopher D.:                   Can our listeners go and find some of that information out? Or is it already in the Facebook group?

Dr. David:                               Well, yeah. A lot of that is from a provider standpoint, as in that Cash-Based Lifestyle Practice. A lot of it is on my YouTube channel. Like if you’re a would-be patient, if you want to call it that. You would go to my www.issmadison.com. We have a blog on there, my YouTube channel, there’s all sorts of videos on there. Everything from different rehab exercises to which meal replacement shakes and different things like that, that people can get into.

Christopher D.:                   I’m so intrigued by all of this and you’ve done such a great job. I’ve got two questions that I love to ask everybody. I’m going to ask you as well. I know that you fast forward to this but I’m watching the sets … This was a great episode, make sure you go back and listen to it.

All of that, but here’s the two questions. The first one is this: If right now, you lost everything, all the money, all the relationships and lost it all … And you had to start over from scratch today … How would you do that?

Dr. David:                               I would literally … I am actually huge into farming. Believe it or not, one of my side-passions. I would go to some remote area with satellite internet and have a little log cabin, where I literally, half of the day work my butt off surviving. Growing my own food, hunting, all of that kind of fun stuff. The other half of the day, I’d start an online information company, based off of my knowledge and I would be perfectly happy.

Christopher D.:                   I love it! That is such a great answer! The second part of the question is, if you had the opportunity to go back in time and sit down next to Dave, at the beginning of his entrepreneur journey, when he first comes out of school … And you had two minutes to share some advice, what advice would you give him?

Dr. David:                               Yeah, oh man, I was a cocky kid when I came out. So, I would literally slap myself and say, “Hey, listen up here!” I was in that mindset where I thought that I knew too much and I thought that I knew way more than I really did about business because I grew up in a small business atmosphere. I wish, going back, I would have been open to the online aspect. I was so traditionally focused, I was so focused on not getting help, not getting a coach. So those would be the two things.

I would tell myself to pay for a really nice coach instead of a mid-level coach because I felt like I knew the same as the mid-level coach but then I didn’t have any implementation so it sucked both ways. I would hire a high-level coach and I would just literally convince myself to be more open to the online aspect. Back then, blogs, and everything were around but it never seemed like it made sense from a provider standpoint because people were coming to me for chiropractic. The reality is, had I been on there talking about strength and conditioning, and exercise physiology back ten years ago, I would be in a completely different … I’d probably own nationwide clinics right now because information is the key to everything. Just getting your knowledge out there.

Christopher D.:                   Great advice, great advice. I feel like we’re going through that revolution right now. I feel like ten years ago, I was a personal trainer and if you were doing blogs and that sort of thing and you could make money off blogs in 2006. This was before You Chip was even out. [inaudible 00:34:19] now it’s very difficult. I feel like it’s the same with social media right now. People are going to look back and remember the [inaudible 00:34:30] and go, “Dang, I wish I started this.”

So I love that advice and anyone listening, get out there and start. Well Dave, what a pleasure. It’s been so much fun to hang out with you. We could stay on for a whole week longer and talk and it’s possible [crosstalk 00:34:43] it’s possible that we will off the air but I want to make sure that we finish up so the listeners really know they got the right information.

Here’s what I want to ask: What is the last thing you want to leave with everyone listening today? How would you like to finish off?

Dr. David:                               You are in control of your own destiny. You plan it yourself because you can change everything.

Christopher D.:                   I can’t agree with any sentence more than that one. You are in control of your destiny. I’ve loved this, from talking about cortisol to stress to how entrepreneurs are wired differently. This has been such a pleasure and entrepreneurs, we need to have more of this conversation.

Dr. David:                               Yeah.

Christopher D.:                   We need more people talking about this. We need more of us moving. Make sure you get back to the basics.

Here’s what I took out of this. I feel very relaxed talking to you. I feel like I better get the water, I’m already doing the walking. I implemented walking meetings to my company recently and so it feels good. It feels really good to know that if you take care of the basics, it’s all there. So I’m going to go get myself a big glass of water I think.

Dr. David:                               Yeah. Because you see my mason jar here?

Christopher D.:                   I’ve been watching you drink it out of a nice glass, a mason jar.

All the links are in the show notes, listeners. Make sure you get over there and check those out. If you want to catch up with Dave and get everything else that he’s talking about … If you’re a practitioner or a provider, make sure you go check out that Facebook, “like”, subscribe and share this episode. Thank you so much for watching another Total Freedom Podcast. What a pleasure and I’ll catch you next time.

Christopher D.:                   Hey it’s Chris, thank you so much for listening to the Freedom Fast-Track Podcast episode. You are the reason we do it. I would love to hear your feedback, I’d love to hear your support. So, please rate this show, please share it with your friends. It’s the only reason we do it, is to get more people living virtually free. To travel the world, make more money, have more time off and do more of what they love. If you wanna increase your freedom, if you want to make more money, if you want to have more time doing what you love, head over to www.christophermduncan.com. There’s free training, gifts, and updates on how you can be expanding your business and expanding your freedom. Again, thank you so much. Please write and subscribe to the show and head over to that site. Right now, so you can get started on your journey to total freedom.